Serenade

Author: Brooke Ellsworth

Publisher: Octopus Books (2017)

Brooke Ellsworth's first full- length collection takes on the question of what poetic expression — "where sentences come from" — looks like if we reject the sources of oppression that pre-exist it. Taking their cue sometimes from haibun, other times from ekphrasis, the poems in Serenade are formally restless and multi-modal- but sustained by a feminism that defines itself by rage that is collective and private, mythological and feral. Serenade is a book that arrives as though chewed out by the political and ecological "turnstile event of monstrosity," and whose authority lies in its nuanced vulnerability: "My authority, reader, is that I am illegible like an oil shale mine spreading its shaky legs."