Sentences and Rain

Elaine Equi was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and raised in Chicago and its outlying suburbs. In 1988, she moved to New York City with her husband, poet Jerome Sala. Over the years, her witty, aphoristic, and innovative work has become nationally and internationally known. Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and on the short list for Canada's prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry. She teaches at New York University, and in the MFA Programs at the New School and the City College of New York.

"Witty and zen-like ... Each poem in this collection does the same thing. They build in insight and delight. Sentences and Rain is truly a masterwork that deserves to be read and disseminated through the population and through time."--NewPages "Equi relishes the stark, overlooked beauty of the quotidian in her curious, winding, fanciful 13th collection."--Publishers Weekly "[Equi is] genuinely funny--like all genuine humorists, she has depth, she picks targets, she's patient, she takes aim ... Equi gives us several drawing boards' worth of characters, or friendly caricatures, framed in a wry, almost lighthearted nostalgia."--American Poets "Equi is here to remind us that our relationship to the objects in our lives can invite us to play, and to engender a new language: private, public, or something in between." --Coldfront "[Equi's poetry is] a gentle exercise in verbal gymnastics which delights the intelligence while at the same time not taking things too seriously. She stretches our imagination by writing lines that constantly surprise us and then makes us pause, as if holding a position, in order to ponder their meaning."--Galatea Resurrects "This bold and polished book of poetry is refreshing in its language and startling in its images. From the expected to the surprising, Equi has a sharp eye for detail in the world around her, and a keen way of capturing the moment for readers."--Manhattan Book Review "This collection will add breadth and depth to any personal library. The breezy tone of these thoughtfully crafted poems belies their underlying seriousness... Equi's elegantly charged sentences will continue to reverberate in the mind and in the heart."--New York Journal of Books "In this tense and terse collection of verse, the poet diminishes language and Western culture to its essence, the distilled acidity of its very bones." --Red Paint Hill "[Equi's] writing is both fluid and agile; there's a free-flowing quality to it but also a sense of composed wit. Equi's collection is an unabashed celebration of the pleasures of language." --Harvard Crimson "If you can imagine it, you can probably find it here in one of Equi's lists of objects both real and surreal."--Library Journal "On every page of Sentences and Rain, Elaine Equi's latest collection of poetry, you will find...pages thrumming with the activity of an original imagination."--KGB Bar Lit Magazine "These spare yet elegant poems are electric, suave, and original. Equi so ably demonstrates a purity of sensibility coupled with peerless brilliance that we are left breathless as we read."--The Journal(West Virginia) "If there is a secret joy informing Equi's poetry, it is in the way she accepts the world as it is, without quarrel and without illusions except those that are sanctioned by art. Like a still-life specialist she gets you to see not only the red flesh of the watermelon but the beauty of the black seeds on it."--Best American Poetry blog

• Spontaneous Generation Cardboard Figures in a Landscape In Black and White If I Have Just One Word The Dark Age of Summer Umbrella Photo Poems Sentences and Rain Royal Feathers Numeric Values Cut to the Chase Jaillight Yo y TuIn Search of the Lost Diminutive Slight Dear Martyr Let’s Do Lunch Pet Shop Fragment Murmur and Motion Dear Ovid Pathos A Story Begins Games of Medieval Sadness Imbibing A Blue Humming A Date with an Undertaker The Dizzy StaircaseReznikoff’s Clocks Time Traveler’s PotlatchHigher PowerDistant RelativesThe Honeycomb of Sleep The Ones You Meet on the Way Up Ode to Distraction Repetition and DurationThe Repairman Black Bag Vanilla Orchids Darkness Adds Beauty Do You Think a Photocopy of a Snowflake Is More Beautiful than the Original? Something’s Coming Varieties of Fire in Hilda MorleyThree Unrelated Restaurant Art Caught in a Downpour Get In Library of E Library of JSome Metallic Scrabble with the Illuminati Blue Jay Way Bardo Boulevard C’Mon, Really This Is Bullshit Trees Rehearsing The Courtyard Backward GlanceThe Lives of StatuesBetter is Better than not Better Happy Birthday, Doc! Resounding Zukofsky RevisionBecomes A Medium Rare Serenade A Gift Serial SeeingHaiku Centos Bill Brandt Phantom Anthem The WinnerMcCabe & Mrs. Miller Pegasus Muffin of Sunsets I Never Seem to Arrive By the River of White NoiseStationary Yet Adrift