Lonesome Gnosis

Elizabeth Scanlon is a poet at once restless, mystic, and matter-of-fact. Her formidable debut collection, Lonesome Gnosis, offers a world wherein wisdom comes wrapped in irreverence, glamor tangoes with indignity, and heaven is a tempting hypothesis kept squarely in the back pocket. Her speakers are varied and variable, yet, among them, an undeniable coherence exists: whether at the laundromat, amid Irish ruins, or drinking martinis in the neighbor's backyard, their inescapable task is to dig down to the root--whether it be physical, psychological, or epistemological. In such a world--a world populated by psychics, dybbuks, mothers, and teenage thumbsuckers--knowing is a form of indecision and escape; language itself is the substance of the sacred and profane, a body rooted and uprooted by chakras and stroop tests, as much as by its own etymological dalliances; and desire is an expression of indeterminacy, which is to say, willfulness and joie de vivre.