Windowpanes
Publisher: Headmistress PressISBN: 978-1735823676Genre: PoetryPrice: $15.00Windowpanes is a collection of poems which explores the intersections between love, loss, longing, and disability. While moving backwards and forwards through time and space, the poems navigate disparate landscapes, both internal and geographical. New York City and the Appalachian mountains of western North Carolina are both critical metaphors and literal landscapes that frame the experiences of these intersections. This work is an exploration of the intimacies, both partnered and solitary, surrounding the author's attempts to deconstruct lifelong assumptions about love, work, loss, and in the end, commitment and creativity.
Elizabeth Wilson won the 2021 Patricia Dobler Award and her first book, Windowpanes, won the 2021 Sappho’s Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Voices from the Attic, among others. She is also a chronic illness advocate, and Rising Voices of Narcolepsy speaker. Learn more here.
Reviews
With sharp and delicate exactness, Elizabeth Wilson gives us glimpses of desire in the poems of Windowpanes— pressing down hard with her words, as with small diamonds that etch memory into the glass of a window. Desire shimmers in these lines–hidden, doubled, queer, rejected, accepted, won, lost, longed for–in the angles of the words, the reflections of our own longing and loves.
Minnie Bruce Pratt, author of Crime Against Nature and Magnified
Poetry is the art of discovery. Elizabeth Wilson’s poems are intimate and reveal their secrets like Russian nesting dolls, their quiet music wrapped around sensual details that slowly allow the reader into a hidden realm that is stunning in its tenderness and precision. There is a lovely sonic architecture at work, confessions that assimilate into the reader and shimmer with urgency long after the book is put away. Windowpanes is a masterful and assured first collection.
Keith Flynn, author of The Skin of Meaning and editor of The Asheville Poetry Review
Reading Elizabeth Wilson’s Windowpanes is like coming upon a small, darkened chapel, one that seems almost too intimate to enter at first, though soon you find you can look out through every one of these stained glass windows, each an intensely colored moment in a heart’s education. Sorrowing and reverent, elusive and clear-eyed. These hard-won poems are a remarkable work of attention.
Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems