Pre-Order (rā′vən): Whispering in the Air by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios, out Dec. 1st.

Pre-Orders will ship the last week of November

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios was born in Healdsburg, California, and is a Professor Emeritus at American University in Washington DC, where she headed the vocal and music programs for many years. She has spent much of her life performing as a singing artist across Europe and the United States having performed solo recitals throughout the US, South America, Scandinavia, Japan and Europe. She directed opera and musical productions, conducted vocal and acting workshops across the US, was the creator and artistic director of the Redwoods Opera Workshop and is a member of the international Who’s Who of Musicians.

She now lives at the edge of the world in Mendocino, California, where her Shih Tzu, Molly keeps her on a short leash. Her award-winning chapbook, Special Delivery, (about her son who was on the Pan Am 103 flight) was published in 2016, and her second, Empty the Ocean with a Thimble by Word Tech Communications in 2021. Her third, Concerto for an Empty Frame was released by Kelsay Books in 2023. She has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize and Best of Net, and has been published widely in journals and anthologies such as Stories of Music, The Poeming Pigeon, Love Notes from Humanity, The Blue Mountain Review, American Journal of Poetry, The Inflectionist Review, Cumberland River Review, The Feminine Collective, The Ekphrastic Review, The Kentucky Review, Unsplendid, Edison Literary Review, Passager, and NILVX.

She is editor of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast Anthology and can be reached

at her website: kirkpatrick-vreniospoet.com

Advance Praise for (rā′vən):

In her latest collection, (rā′vən), Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios covers a lot of ground

—and sky—when it comes to the species of bird that Edgar Allan Poe turned into a poetic icon. The title itself is styled as the dictionary’s pronunciation of the word, somehow portraying a sense of being suspended in midair, which the reader soon recognizes as stark symbolism for the unbearable loss of a son, in flight (“who gave me ravens”), and this courageous poet’s unending grief, compounded by the more recent catastrophes of the pandemic and California wildfires. This skillful and passionate poet displays a panoply of wide-spanning styles (or, in the poet’s words, a Rorschach of

Ravens), adroitly interspersing brief and often mournful poems depicting acute loneliness with well-crafted ghazals, numbered lists, centos, shaped poems, and prose, along with linguistically daring erasures, neatly aligned columns, and startling palindromic lines. The strategic spacing of each poem creates a paradoxical combination of willy-nilly randomness and careful deliberation, as if trying to coerce wholeness out of uncertainty, instability, and turmoil. While these poems invoke the biblical and mythological, they come mainly from matters of the heart (“Sometimes a body wears the world like this”), but the poet also allows us a reprieve, characterizing the ravens as “clowns of the sky” and the amusing image of crows spreading gossip while perched along telephone wires. The ravens that glide through these poems are clearly not Poe’s; indeed, they are this gifted poet’s shape-shifters, offering both harrowing dark and hopeful light, rendering these emotionally charged and jarring poems both elegiac birdcall and majestic birdsong.

—Cindy Hochman, editor of First Literary Review-East and author of

Telling You Everything

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios’s (rā′vən) is, like all records of obsession, as much about

the poet’s uncountable selves as it is about the birds that lend the collection its name.

Unlike many such collections, however, (rā′vən) suffers little torment under the spell of its fixations. Here we meet speakers who glory and revel, kvetch and exult. Not even

the death of a son diminishes the gratitude that glances like light off an angled wing.

When Kirkpatrick-Vrenios writes, “I will get used to this brightness / slashing an

unfamiliar swath / of blue sky,” I believe her.

—Joshua Davis, author of Authentic Embellishments: Fragments of a Life

Saved by Poetry

Right from the opening of her remarkable collection (rā′vən), Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-

Vrenios grapples with questions about the ravens flying outside her window,

questions reflecting the speaker as much as the covids themselves:

“They fly in duets/ Forever mates togeter/ Why is one alone?” Kirkpatrick-Vrenios utilizes similar double entendres throughout her book, touching on both the

observed world and the interiority of the self. This self is both

isolated and haunted by the ghosts of her son, her partner, her mother.

In order to answer such questions, one moment the poet makes continuous leaps, one

moment observing synaesthesic phrases, such as “my knees sing” or “a halo/ pungent

as lemon”; she experiments with the page, playing with spatial arrangements; she

employs ghazals, pantoums, lists, concrete poems, mirroring language, deconstructing

and reconstructing language. Leaving no raven unexplored, the poet reimagines

familiar personas, such as Gretel, Bathsheba, Hugin (Odin’s Greedy Raven), Naamah (Noah’s wife), a queen’s executioner, Lot’s wife. In the end, however, she returns to the

metaphor of the raven, utilizing a Haida myth to see this creature as light bearer, so

amidst this dark and isolated world, we are neither alone nor hopeless. Ultimately,

Kirkpatrick-Vrenios’ spiritual concerns knit her larger questions together, offering us the

balm of a beacon in the vast darkness. the apocalyptic fires affecting California, the next

probing the mythic, making such transitions seem effortless. The poet bends language

at almost every turn, utilizing word play, puns, musicality in the language and references

to music;

—David Holper, inaugural Poet Laureate of Eureka, California and author of 

The Bridge: Poems