Entangled by Emily Church

To read Emily Church’s poetry collection Entangled is to be reminded — gloriously — that we are, each of us, not alone, but part of something larger than ourselves. Just as the poems acknowledge, and deftly negotiate, the limits of language, so does the poet, and the artist, now a mother of two small children, negotiate the various and manifold demands of motherhood, its states of completeness and vulnerability heightened by a world in pandemic shutdown.

By allowing us to share in the discoveries that these poems — and the paintings with which they are interwoven — hold and reveal, the poet and artist offers us nothing less than the experience itself: Here is the line in constant motion and at rest; never fixed, never slack. Here is the self, recalling itself to itself, expansively resilient, and full of wonder — a voice with a million things to say.

I urge you to cross this threshold, to open Entangled, and partner with its elements, both earthly and cosmic.

–LISA ANDREWS, poet

The vivid observations in Emily Church‘s debut collection Entangled reveal an honest account of what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and an artist during the crisis of a pandemic and beyond. These poems and images will delight readers with the beauty Emily uncovers in the mundane.

—SARAH YOST, poet, educator

Emily Church’s lovely chapbook Entangled explores a coming-into motherhood, filled with what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being” — tender shocks and initiations into wonder, such as a child’s new name, Orion, “three stars upon your cheek/ calling through the universe/ to be born again in your body.” These are poems of “reckoning” and careful attention. No matter the place or season, at every step the poet, who is also a long-time visual artist, sees:  “…a tiger swallowtail with a torn wing/…/ nursed on a wedge of orange”; ginkgo berries that “form a peach flesh mess/ on the glass studded paths in the park…”; roses that “will gather against the wall/ adding a deep magenta hue/ among the shades of green.”  These details of light, color and shadow become, in Church’s poems, expressions of love—not just for her children but for the world itself, from “fungi softly sifting underfoot” to “the infinity/ of a New York blue morning.”

–MERLE BACHMAN, poet, translator