$10.95

ISBN: 9781625572387

Catalog: Black Lawrence Press

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Categories Black Lawrence Press, Chapbooks, Contest Winners, Poetry, The Black River Chapbook Competition

California Pompeii

Name: California Pompeii
SKU: 9781625572387
Price: 10.95 USD
Availability: InStock

Emelie Griffin

Publication Date: February 23, 2027

Description

Winner of the Spring 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition

California Pompeii, the debut short poetry collection from Emelie Griffin, wonders what may emerge beyond precarity and attends to the beautiful salvage that outlasts loss. At once devotional and incisive, these poems reach for the contours of our entwinement with each other and with the natural world—not to declare, but to feel them. Sun-streaked and fleeting memories of place, self, and other form a mesh where narrative blurs and fragments, but where seeking persists.

Praise

Emelie Griffin’s California Pompeii reminds us that the lyric is born of devastation. The devastation of the earth and the devastation of the heart, history’s innumerable ruins and the devastation that is language, from le mot juste to the silence that follows failed utterance. And so, Griffin writes in fragments and gestures, through “(a thrum, a ghost),” offering a poetry luminous with intelligence and ache in equal measure. “I am trying to describe how it feels / to have shorn myself of what I believed,” the poet admits of her meticulous art. As beautiful as it is devastating, California Pompeii invites us to grieve and revel in the radiant knowledge that “to contain is impossible.”
—Jennifer Chang, author of An Authentic Life

California Pompeii is a work of profound musical nuance and existential grace. Emelie Griffin crafts lines that emerge as though from a reserve of silence, and with such urgency as to redirect the world, at once ancient and imminent, disclosing webs of inward reflection cast out to the stars, and further still to the unknowable. Her poems stage scenes of relation—personal, ecological—attuning image to sound with a force of mind that arbitrates “how to lace / beauty with disaster,” and with such “intimacy unbound by the relic” of a body as to inhabit the “early voice of everything”—twin name for the “quick bloom of being inside.”
—Roberto Tejada, author of Carbonate of Copper

From the start of this impressive collection, the reader feels the power of the interior brought into the light. It’s like finding and witnessing the motive for desire. Like Emily Dickinson’s “Vesuvius at home”, the volcanic is put in a small space which amplifies that destructive and creative force. The poems are fire and ash. They “lace / beauty with disaster.” They are a “raw thing”, animal and divine. They vibrate with possibility, with a rapture that is conscious of its rupture. Griffin is a horse running in a meadow with nostrils flared, all nerve and intelligence and motion.
—Bruce Smith, author of Hungry Ghost

About the Author

Emelie Griffin

Emelie Griffin's work has received support from the Ucross Foundation, Inprint, the Academy of American Poets, and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference; and has been published by journals including Denver Quarterly, New England Review, and American Chordata. She teaches at Florida State University.