Books
IF THIS MAKES YOU NERVOUS • 2021
Marcel Duchamp, Tony Oursler, Joseph Beuys, and Caravaggio (among others) supercharge Elena Karina Byrne’s new book If This Makes You Nervous. Wildly fighting the ekphrastic, Byrne’s poems get lapel-pulled-close to the dark overtones of being. “Did I mention you are me?” she asks. “I am riddled &/gated, keyed like a car in a future divebar’s parking lot.” The “bled glitter” and exciting poetics of If This Makes You Nervous boils over with memory and meaning. Gorgeous “from the Mona & the Lisa” on.
— Terese Svoboda
In this original and beguiling collection, Elena Karina Byrne offers us her private gallery and guides through episodes of her life, revealing to us not only how works of art have instructed and nurtured her, but also how her life became imprinted on the art. As she engages with the art of visionaries, iconoclasts, and infidels (from Marcel Duchamp to Nan Goldin) they, in return, challenge her, “Can you circus act in color, grief-teach yourself / how to dance out the floorboards away from the house into the fields again?” (“Can Cindy Sherman Wear my Hair?”). The art allows for her own reckoning, and with lush language adn alluringly reckless syntax, she voices her urgent and vulnerable responses inseparable from the art itself.
— Molly Bendall
Drawn into a heady swirl of images riding sinuous sysntax, I was curved swiftly, slippery, but unblurred in Elena Karina Byrne’s If This Makes You Nervous. The poet strokes a verbal impasto with lines that spun me through kunst-struck odes to artists here and gone, sudden un-nostalgic memories, “time’s own vertigo,” and wild eros. Elegiac in mode, not mood, Byrne disinters vision after vision, breakneck and breathless from her “terror-hairless skull,” pounding, enveloping, and cutting the lyric into ekphrastic surrender. This is a stunning book.
— Douglas Kearney
NO, DON’T • 2020
“In Elena Karina Byrne’s spectacular NO, DON’T, we are immersed in a poetry of the kaleidoscopic past and insufferable future: ‘Pick/ the lock, you can’t but you can carry a doorknob/ into the next life.’ Yes, these are brilliant poems of reckoning, with time, with death, and the nature of consciousness, all haunted by Byrne’s lost sister, memorialized in, ‘Lynne’s Car Washed Violently Down, Off the Cliff.’ Byrne is a poet with an astonishing gift for imagery and music: ‘the curved/ inside of the mouth/ when singing is grief alone,’ Byrne writes in one poem, and in another, ‘I alone, fear being alone, far from the blood vocabulary.’ Reading NO, DON’T, I was reminded of Paul Valery’s definition of the poem as ‘that prolonged hesistation between sound and sense.’ Indeed, Byrne’s poems read like ‘a painting still wet between a girl’s legs in a field of music.’”
— Allison Benis White
“Elena Karina Byrne’s new chapbook NO, DON’T hurls us into a muddy and kaleidoscopic garden full of grief, desire, unrest, and wild growth. Each poem seeks expansive vines of visceral feeling, twisting in the poet’s buzzing interiority: ‘Today, all memory ruins / downstream to the bee-swarm.’ Byrne’s language is rife with heart-bending synesthesia and elegiac musicality: ‘Mole ribs broke in the hard ground, the green canary lungs / were crushed by coal and a threshold torrent of deep sea / anchovies were made where we couldn’t see them school.’ Reading these poems, I am reminded of the voraciousness of imagination. Like ‘filling up the water with knives,’ this chapbook slices open the guts of fear, trailing with resilience.”
— Jane Wong
“Ferocious in their intelligence, delightful in the beauty and insouciance they carry as lightly as a pair of opera gloves, these poems offer language, language, language as an antidote to cultural and personal amnesia, to childhood pain and adult pain; as an answer to the eternal conundrums of history and philosophy. NO, DON’T, the title tells us — don’t be hoodwinked by the world, by the status quo; don’t be silenced or side-lined by anything, much less grief. Rarely does a chapbook give birth to so many light-filled galaxies. Do read this essential new work by acclaimed poet Elena Karina Byrne.”
— Gail Wronsky
SQUANDER • 2016
Squander occupies a place where “the mind’s upstairs windows [are] blown out”: a place of juxtapositional delight through sensory and conceptual dislocation. Its centripetal force arises from the risk of language and from a persuasion of alarming imagery. Poems based in word origins work as fables and poems based in dialogue work within a select concordance from authors and artists. The consequent subject’s meaning is diverted and new vantage points are created. Squander’s energized music, its alliance with feeling’s final rhythm “makes us complicit” in the re-awaking of language.
If you are lucky enough to be bewitched by Elena Karina Byrne’s brilliant poems, then you will travel across time, space, and the ocean of language. In her beautiful new book, Squander, Karina Byrne again douses the reader in her sparkle and luminosity, through poems triggered by Shakespeare, Amy Winehouse, Georgia O’Keefe, and Rilke. There’s a driving breathiness and breathlessness in Karina Byrne’s poems, as if a voice is haunting your ear, unveiling what a genius mind might see and feel through language. This is Karina Byrne's deepest exploration of language yet; there’s no one writing like her and her voice is an essential one in American poetry.
— Victoria Chang
Ultimately the title of the book tells all—squander, be willing to give, even to waste words; cast the net wide: “O Obedience like a horse, we are / trained to the bit, mouth-made. Heresy. Here. Say” says Elena Karina Byrne, and she practices with enthusiasm such preachment throughout the book. The intelligence here is always willing to sacrifice itself to energy—“turn a plum into/an orange//word into words”—and the result is an unforgettable exuberance of poetry. And of an enchanting intelligence.
— Bin Ramke
Fully recognizing that we are numerous, as are the snares and delights of the written word and the influences of history, Elena Karina Byrne's "Squander" diligently investigates living in language—from attention to responsibility toknowledge—and creates a dedicated space for beauty to interrogate truth, encumbering our sometimes inexplicable world in a net of indelible lineages and connections.
— Maxine Chernoff
MASQUE • 2008
The Greeks highest compliment to Odysseus was to call him “myriad-minded.” Shall we say of Elena Byrne’s amazing sequence that it is “myriad-masked?” By turns poignant, intricate, ingenious—Byrne’s poems explore and dramatize the theme of mask into a multiplicity of insights and imaginings almost as rich as consciousness itself.
— Gregory Orr
If I can’t have you, everyone else will,” begins Elena Karina Byrne’s Masque, an implosion of refracted and fractal selves. Wearing both the mask of Greek persona and the mascara of postmodern personality, these voices—whether moon or necropolis, vertigo or ventriloquist, Penelope or pen name, Rorschach or rant—revel in what one poem calls “this terrifying devotion to language.” Ancient, proliferative, profligate, and prophetic as language itself—“I am that greased machinery of heresy and hearsay”—these poems might have issued from the oracle at Delphi herself: “my flush crawl space in the mind/ Where, Ich Dien, I serve, am iamb slang-maid made to make you/ Sing my by-word, nay-word, password dance into the next/ World.”
— Angie Estes
Instantly ticklish and slowly narcotic, the language of Elena Karina Byrne’s curious index of masks in her new book nearly confounds the rigor of its ancient form, the poetic catalogue. Yet one cannot help but trail the voice threading through these veils made of words, at once Luciferian and terribly vulnerable to its own power, as it escorts the reader, and abandons her, into a dappled space reminiscent of one of Tolstoy’s great Russian balls—a social and erotic prospect distilled to meteoric gestures. One can only yield to the naked hermeticism of this book.
— Daniel Tiffany
In verse simmering with sensuality, Elena Karina Byrne eloquently reveals, then carefully slices away, layer after layer of the masks we wear until our most secret selves are exposed. With imagery at once exotic and electric, individual pretense dissolves in the service of revelation, and we find ourselves irresistibly drawn into an internal dialogue that is unabashedly intimate. Find here a voice that is like no other we know.
— Tupelo Press
The Flammable Bird • 2002
Sometimes, when a gifted poet bides his or her time, their first book seems more like a fourth or fifth book. The Flammable Bird is like that; a book flung whole, utterly original, beautiful and seamless, upon the world.
— Thomas Lux
Elena Karina Byrne's The Flammable Bird, is a powerful and exquisite collection of poems. Graceful and lyrically complex, this word invites us into the layered realms of consciousness, into both the sublime pleasures and the raw psychological densities of contemporary experience. Like the phoenix, Elena Karina Byrne lifts herself — and us — high above the ash of our disappointments and regrets. A marvelous debut.
— David St. John
“Like Hopkins’s kingfisher, Elena Karina Byrne’s flammable bird takes off from the branch of human passion, though the heaven she is dwarn to is desire itself, ‘the sanctuary of hunger’, the appetite that will not be fed. Enfleshed, inflamed, insatiable, these form her holy trinity, and the heady, headlong language of her poems has honored them with an artful liturgy of devotional wonders.”
— Sherod Santos