Drift

by Ellie White

From Drift:
“The beach at night

rolls into itself, blue into black.


My mother hates swimming,

yet here she is, emerging from darkness

in a damp, red one-piece.



Her hair long, like it was before

I existed. Come she says.

The water feels so good.



She’s right. When I slip in,

I barely feel myself drown. “

Genres: Poetry

24 pages, Paperback

Published August 26, 2019

About the author

Ellie White has been trying really hard since 1986. She holds an MFA from Old Dominion University. Her volume of work includes poetry, creative nonfiction, and the comic strip “Uterus & Ellie.” Ellie’s writing has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Breakwater Review, The Columbia Review, and many other journals. She has published two other poetry chapbooks, Requiem for a Doll (ELJ Publications, 2015) and Drift (dancing girl press, 2019), as well as a hybrid memoir, and for too long after (Unsolicited Press, 2019). Her work has won an Academy of American Poets College Poetry Prize, a Best of the Net nomination, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and was a finalist for the Meridian Short Prose Prize. She is currently a reader at Muzzle Magazine, where she has served on staff since 2016.

Reviews

[James A Crider · Rating 5 out of 5]

This chapbook will leave you enthralled, disturbed, and desperate for more.

These poems will lure you in with their seemingly everyday normality before they take their dark turn. Both bloody visceral horror hiding just under the surface of our skin and the horror the other side of an unlocked door creaking open are both well represented here. The blood will flow.