Portrait of the Future with Trapdoor
Red Paint Hill, 2016 Winner of the 2015 Bryant-Lisembee Book Prize Cover art by Bryan Christie | Book design by Yanyi Portrait of the Future with Trapdoor explores what happens when the body and society each turn on themselves. The book traverses grief, disease, surgery, fertility, mass weddings, mass shootings, fallout, war, abduction, and the gradual collapse of ecosystems — yet the poems are funny, confessional, and self-deprecating with a tinge of the absurd. They have a willingness not to know, to fiercely acknowledge suffering while mounting an escape. |
“Because, as Elizabeth Onusko tells us, ‘Sadness is rarely precise,’ each poem in this book tries to surround and plumb its imprecision with language so acutely exacting that the impossibility of locating sadness and its remedy is made evermore sad, the desire for a child and a pathology’s thwarting of that desire evermore desirous and unfulfilled until, as magically as these beautiful poems seem to have arrived (against all odds, always), the body, too, arrives anew. There are moments in this book as rare and unexpected as any in contemporary poetry today. And that is because of one thing: Onusko is luminous.”
-Katie Ford, author of Deposition, Colosseum, and Blood Lyrics
“Welcome to the battlefield. In this electrically charged debut, Elizabeth Onusko pits societal revolutionaries against the human body fragile under the dominion of disease. Whether on the grandest scale or at the microscopic, cellular level, Onusko’s precise imagery builds a new landscape both magical and terrifying. Here, we are trapped behind walls of bone, skulls become fishbowls, glass drops from a spiraling staircase — charting a powerful journey in search of the healing that opens the door.”
-Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Sightseer, Her Human Costume, and Paper Doll Fetus
“I’ve never seen infertility described such — so magically, weaving science, lyric, heartache, ruthless precision, with the fanciful strange surreal, all through an apocalyptic lens that ends with rebirth (birth!) and hope! The speaker’s examination of her own body takes my breath away.”
-Jennifer Givhan, author of Landscape with Headless Mama and Protection Spell
-Katie Ford, author of Deposition, Colosseum, and Blood Lyrics
“Welcome to the battlefield. In this electrically charged debut, Elizabeth Onusko pits societal revolutionaries against the human body fragile under the dominion of disease. Whether on the grandest scale or at the microscopic, cellular level, Onusko’s precise imagery builds a new landscape both magical and terrifying. Here, we are trapped behind walls of bone, skulls become fishbowls, glass drops from a spiraling staircase — charting a powerful journey in search of the healing that opens the door.”
-Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Sightseer, Her Human Costume, and Paper Doll Fetus
“I’ve never seen infertility described such — so magically, weaving science, lyric, heartache, ruthless precision, with the fanciful strange surreal, all through an apocalyptic lens that ends with rebirth (birth!) and hope! The speaker’s examination of her own body takes my breath away.”
-Jennifer Givhan, author of Landscape with Headless Mama and Protection Spell