Main Content
Causa Sui
Winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Prize
Dorian Elizabeth Knapp is the poet we need in these dark and troubled times. With wit, wisdom, and deep feeling, the poems in Causa Sui speak directly to the madness of the moment. Knapp draws on an astonishing diversity of sources, from pop culture and political tracts to Western philosophy and Greek myth, creating deftly wrought poems that provide a way of understanding, enduring, and responding to the mayhem.
Causa Sui is a collection that engages deeply with poetic tradition but, more importantly, hungers for a reality better than the one we have at hand. “Sometimes I want to take // the world between my hands & shake it / really hard,” admits the speaker of one poem, “& sometimes I want to read // it like I would a favorite novel, slowly, / over a season.” Elizabeth Knapp has unerring instincts for how to carve a line, whether from intimate memory, reflections on pop culture, or the raw clay of ChatGPT. This is a bold, potent book written in time—a record of anger, a marker of the will to endure, and a celebration of wit and its power to instigate.
—Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode
With burnished lyricism and uncanny wisdom, the poems in Causa Sui ask what it means to make art at this post-pandemic, post-insurrection moment in history, calling upon pop culture as well as Western philosophy, Greek mythology, and the reality of active shooter drills. The humor in this book is both arch and necessary; we find ourselves in a dark time and place in which Americans devise “new & inventive ways of / killing each other,” then “hide / the evidence” before “set[ting] the forest on fire.” Causa Sui will give you the courage to reenter and reclaim this broken world. The songs we keep sustain us, Knapp says: they “open themselves & take flight.”
—James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy
Furious, sorrowful, and hilarious, Causa Sui is a full-throated lamentation for the America of our dreams. It speaks directly to our present moment, where “we’re always on the cusp / of catastrophe…simmering on the stove of history.” Knapp draws on all the material of our “simmering” world—Britney Spears, the Ancient Greeks, Project 2025, assorted philosophers and poets, ChatGPT—to craft glittering sonnets, erasures, couplets, and found poems. She takes the measure of our current reality—“This is how we do it in America, big fat clouds / like blank checks over our heads, our SUVs // parked in the driveway like slumbering gods”—asking, “how can we / save ourselves from ourselves when / we’re holding both the gun & the target?” Darkly funny, sharply self-aware, yet deeply felt, these poems are essential reading for anyone stunned and stumbling through our times
—Kirun Kapur, author of Women in the Waiting Room
Dorian Elizabeth Knapp grew up in Houston and has lived in Massachusetts, California, Michigan, and Maryland, with brief stints in London and Prague. She earned a B.A. from Amherst College, an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. Her first book of poems, The Spite House, won the 2010 De Novo Poetry Prize and was published by C&R Press in 2011. Her second collection, Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak, won the 2019 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize and was published by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House in 2019. Her third collection, Causa Sui, won the 8th Annual Three Mile Harbor Book Award and will be published by Three Mile Harbor Press in the fall of 2025. Her other honors include the 2022 Atlanta Review International Poetry Award, the 2018 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a 2017 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Sun. She is the founding director of the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Hood College and lives in Frederick, Maryland with her husband, the novelist Robert Eversz, and their two children.