Estranged

by Elizabeth Ellen

Estranged & Other American Poems 2019-2022 is a short collection of red hot poetry by American author and editor, Elizabeth Ellen.
Where danger and disappointment meet in a heap in the corner of Modern Midwestern America.

120 pages, Paperback

Published June 13, 2023

About the author

Elizabeth Ellen's stories have appeared in numerous online and print journals over the last ten years, including elimae, Quick Fiction, Hobart, Lamination Colony, Muumuu House, HTMLGIANT, and many others. She is the author of the chapbook Before You She Was a Pit Bull (Future Tense) and her collection of flash fictions, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix, was included in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: four chapbooks of short short fiction by four women (Rose Metal Press). Fast Machine is a collection of her best work from the last decade. She was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize for her story "Teen Culture" which appeared in American Short Fiction in 2012. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she co-edits Hobart and oversees Hobart's book division, Short Flight/Long Drive Books.

Reviews

[nineinchnovels · Rating 2 out of 5]

I DNF at 85% because I literally couldn’t connect to anything in this book and was wondering why I kept trying to push on to read.

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Made me wanna drink beer and smoke cigarettes.
I found this fun and trashy and smart and wild and sometimes in bad taste. I liked the Machine Gun Kelly poem.

[Paige Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got this because I like the author's riot grrlish Twitter as EIC of Hobart, which publishes things with all the "bad," gross words w/ alt girl aesthetic. This is pocketbook size but 120ish pages with small font. The first poem reminds me of a song's preamble, something Lana Del Rey would cinematically say before a music video. Even though it's simple diction, conversational and longing, it's twisty w/ good line breaks for different meanings.

I would cut down on the repeated phrases, because they're already too fresh in our heads since there's >200 words already in most poems. Following her relationship is interesting, not because it's well-written, but because it's voyeuristic into how two writers would engage. I hope the author is talking about a time she was in her teens to early 20s because that's how the emo pup love comes off. But then the next poem is about having a grown daughter? I know it's said the narrator is unreliable, but I hope that just means there are multiple, maybe some fictitious. Later on though, she says, "I always do things backwards."

The line about divorce marking the happiest year of her life should be the focus of a poem or three. Living on little as a dream kiss is a good, tingly-lipped concept. As is the Spears-esque head-shaving though it's a blip. Cute, about wishing she bought a silly I <3 Mississippi shirt with the ex to write this poem in. That poem has good, offbeat specifics. "The [Sunday] my tears dried into" is a sweetly sentimental line. The part about love poems sounding like trite lobotomy talk is real, as is the epidemic of lonliness causing every larger societal problem (I'd go further and say the astronomical lack of loving parents).

I don't like the references (the author doesn't even always) because they seem too much like a Tumblr cliche wading into her freshman year: ultra-derivative Plath, smoking/wine-ing as a personality, a David Foster Wallce film, U2, Hemmingway, Warhol, waaay too many movies. It's just too matchy-matchy. Though the Kafka implication in Covid is funny, or Johnny Cash singing about a cigarette, or Joe Rogan being like a beefy Mr. Rogers. That Kanye poem, which has almost nothing to do with him, I guess does go nutso and random like him once Post Malone is mentioned for no reason...and then something about "anal flaps." Very ironic but nothing else is like it in the book.

This book is kinda the opposite of estrangement mentally/emotionally; it's obsession. "Guns n Roses" is how I expected/wanted the entire book to be. More excitement, specifics, real events...like catching chlamydia. Wife-beaters and hot tubs, muscle car swagger and conflicts of image. It's like all the good stuff is after the two-thirds mark. Nirvanay, vivid, pop culturely, vulnerable about even being yeasty. Because of the medical realness of that area, I thought BM was about pennyroyal tea type shit instead of baby mamas, adding a dif flavor to the trashtality. I'm surprised to see my thoughts mirrored in Please Read Dennis. Now that is the Hobart punk I was looking for all along.

[Kate Hayner-Slattery · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's maybe as hard to rate a poetry collection as it is to rate a short story anthology - I loved some of these, I detested others. If this were fiction I'd call it an unreliable narrator. It's kind of surreal to watch someone wreck their life in retrospective, in only the poetry they willingly chose to publish, especially when it's unclear whether they've even realized it yet. but ultimately this was worth reading and I'll go back to a couple of the poems I felt hard enough to dog-ear

[Alexandre Alphonse · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I never knew I was his girl
Til I heard her [sic] refer to me as such.”
🤪

Pretty trite and uninterestingly narcissistic, and I’d have been unable to read it in my native tongue (I’ve learned some words this way) cos it’d be way too embarassing, but 3 blinging stars coz fun and easy, bros and sis.

The thing about being a rape apologist felt way too retarded, not at all maudit, rebellious or fatale, I must say 🤪

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection is raunchy and hardly poetic but I suppose that depends on what you consider poetry to be. It feels like the author poured out the thoughts we have in our head at night that we try to chase away, or try to pretend never existed. I like the concept, and some of them were actually fairly funny, but I didn’t feel like I could relate much to the content which is probably why it didn’t feel poetic to me.

[Helena Pedrotti]

I had a good time, the most interesting part for me was trying to figure out the narrative thread between the poems so I'd put it in a sort of long form poetry space which I generally quite like. The author is at once difficult to sympathize with and deeply relatable and I thought a lot about my assumptions about age (how old the writer was at this point etc). The poems are not linear and I sometimes struggled to tell whether we were talking about the same "you" as before

[Julius Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think it pushes a boundary of what constitutes poetry, and in that it is not the most poetic… but i found it to be honest and relatable and free of some kind of self righteous writer speak, life is not poetry, here she says it quite plainly, i felt like I was just hearing her think, it was funny raw and very tumblr 2015. Awesome.

[AutomaticSlim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much prefer an interconnected poetry book like this that reads like a novel. Loved it. Humor and heartbreak, over explaining in the best way.

Love Ellen, and excited that there are still a few books of hers I haven't read yet.

Round up 5

[Ellie]

Not for me

[Emi Porfiri · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Neglect the whole world rather than each other”.

[Cora · Rating 1 out of 5]

I liked a couple of poems (Ohio II and Lance Armstrong), but overall not for me! Hope to read more of her work tho