Elena Karina Byrne's poetry is found in earnest and in exaltation, in her love for language and its lushness. Each poem in her debut collection, The Flammable Bird, is an occasion for wonder, pathos and human intensity, and these observations, collectively, offer an opulent and florid document of our modernity. These poems are rich, and revel in the risks they take with metaphor and image. The beauty created is dazzling.

The Flammable Bird

Literature & Fiction

Byrne, Elena Karina

Poetry

William Ralph Pr

Squander occupies a place where “the mind’s upstairs windows [are] blown out”: a place of juxtapositional delight through sensory and conceptual dislocation. Poems based in word origins work as fables, and poems based in dialogue work within a select concordance from authors and artists. The consequent subject’s meaning is diverted and new vantage points are created. Squander’s energized music, its alliance with feeling’s final rhythm “makes us complicit” in the re-awaking of language.

Squander

Omnidawn

Lyrical narrative poetry that responds to works of art.\nElena Karina Byrne’s fourth collection of poems offers what she describes as an homage to her art-immersed upbringing with poems that challenge perception as they create a dialogue between the speaker and sixty-six artists. Lyrical narratives unfold with psychological urgency and candor as they re-encounter each artist’s unique oeuvre. The poems are as political as they are personal, mapping out the author’s emotional, spatial, and gender orientations within the confines of our visual culture.\nLonging and loss prevail in If This Makes You Nervous, always leading the reader on winding paths that return to the bodily while balancing beauty and terror and what is seen and what remains invisible. If This Makes You Nervous is a devotional look at shifting identity that begins in a preteen’s memory, moves through history’s collective body, and ends with what is “connected and accounted for” in the imagination’s relativistic measure of time.

If This Makes You Nervous

"Elena Karina Byrne's chapbook, NO, DON'T, offers a restless portrait of identity that reflects the shifting terrains of desire and gender, of personal loss and punishing empowerment, and of political and cultural abuse. Under the influence of language's "steeplechase hours," this book's "carnal ambition" becomes a cinematic crash between fate and will as reality marries wild imagination. Each inventive poem turns perception into action and feeling into a musical art of attention as the poet travels between the past and the present, between conscious and unconscious thinking, in order to tell a powerful story"--

No, Don't

Humor & Satire

What Books Press

Elena Karina Byrne's poetry is found in earnest and in exaltation, in her love for language and its lushness. Each poem in her debut collection, The Flammable Bird, is an occasion for wonder, pathos and human intensity, and these observations, collectively, offer an opulent and florid document of our modernity. These poems are rich, and revel in the risks they take with metaphor and image. The beauty created is dazzling.

Flammable Bird, The

Tupelo Press

In verse simmering with sensuality, Elena Karina Byrne eloquently reveals, then carefully slices away, layer after layer of the masks we wear until our most secret selves are exposed. Pretense is overthrown in her exotic and electric imagery, irresistibly drawing the reader into an unabashedly intimate internal dialogue.

MASQUE

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