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Elizabeth Knapp

Poet

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Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak

Winner of the 2019 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize

“Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak is a chronicle of our nation. It is a muscular, funny, sad, and fully American collection.”
—Jennifer Martelli, Up the Staircase Quarterly

“Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak dissects our contemporary moment…Knapp adroitly settles into this space and offers her readers a lament and a liturgy for living in our times.”
—Rachel Morgan, North American Review

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Art by Steven Spazuk
“Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak is a collection that simultaneously sings and jolts with poems that lithely move from the exterior to the interior life of middle-class America. On these pages, we meet the best and worst America offers—its traditions, its heroes, and its enemies—and we are charged with understanding each in a more complex light. As in the ending of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus in which “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” this work masterfully finds hope in whatever dark beauty American culture offers.”
—Airea D. Matthews
“From Koko the Gorilla to the ghosts of Kurt Cobain, David Bowie, and the ghosted culture left by Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress and Hillary Clinton’s woods, Elizabeth Knapp astounds us with her tonal range and tribal-American fluency. She is a high stylist and formal master, convincing us not so much of Baudrillard’s notion that “more and more information” leads to “less and less meaning,” but that more information forces us to excavate newer meanings ... Her poems clatter, clang, and hurt—fiercely memorable in the “shopping cart” of our minds.”
—Mark Irwin
“In Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak, Elizabeth Knapp grapples with the ache of being alive, “the cleaving of new selfhood,” and the strangeness of our intimacies—between husband and wife, mother and child, the self and the I with which it speaks. Her series of “self-portraits”—as Kurt Cobain in drag, as Cindy Sherman’s Instagram account—speaks to the slipperiness of the self, and to its multiplicity. This is a book of yearning and questioning, and that is poetry.”
—Maggie Smith

 

 

  

 
 

 About Elizabeth

 

Photo by Stadtkind Photography

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 BA from Amherst College, an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and a PhD 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 other honors include the 2018 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a 2017 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award, and the 2015 Literal Latté Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and Quarterly West. An associate professor of English and Chair of the Department of English & Communications Arts at Hood College, she lives in Frederick, Maryland with her husband, the novelist Robert Eversz, and their two children.

Photo by Robert Eversz