“In her brilliant debut collection, Nights I Let the Tiger Get You, Elizabeth Cantwell excavates layers of contemporary anxiety to reveal that Blake’s Tyger has been, all along, that rough beast slouching toward us, and is in fact now living among us-with an unsettling intimacy-in both our unconscious and daily lives. Elizabeth Cantwell’s poems honor the disjunctions of voice and dislocations of consciousness present in our century, and their elegant and luminous shards glint in the darkness like the Tyger’s stripes. These exquisite reflections form a kind of handbook of post-apocalyptic forms, as the most psychologically fraught aspects of our dreams slowly emerge as the actual landscapes of our lives.”
-David St. John
The surreal volleys in Elizabeth Cantwell’s poems vividly capture the miniature catastrophes and cataclysms hidden within suburban America and its culture. Her poems ‘Recess’ and ‘Interlude,’ with their taut imagination, echo that horror in our lives to make something happen. The tiger in these poems is real, synonymous with an unnamed anxiety, and roams at will through our haunted lives: “we’re flying / onto some other field of pistols. We have / more than one shot.” Her vision is unconventional and often brilliant.”
-Mark Irwin
Submerged in a burning sea of images, is the dreamer losing or finding herself? ‘Fire self-replicates,’ yet she is ‘not a flame or a ripple.’ Simultaneously bold and hermetic, these poems are ferociously interrogatory, seeking to distinguish between what can and cannot be saved.”
Elizabeth Cantwell's first book of poetry, Nights I Let The Tiger Get You, was a finalist for the 2012 Hudson Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as PANK, The Los Angeles Review, Anti-, La Petite Zine, and the Indiana Review. A former high school teacher, she is now a Provost's Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she is earning her PhD in Literature & Creative Writing.
