Surrender by Ellen Birkett Morris

$14.00

 

 

Ellen Morris‘ short, spare poems in Surrender are full of vivid images, arrows aimed at our shared human experiences. It’s as if she reads our memories and says, “Yes, I know.” She slides from sweet to astringent to amorous. A mother sends her daughter off to school: “…I catch a glimpse/of her purple gloved hand waving/as she sends me off into the world.” A father is remembered as he polished his shoes: “…The bristled brush so like you, easily rubbed the wrong way.” The joy of Saturday sex: “As the mailman rings the doorbell, we lie together slowing.”
Each verse contains a delightful surprise.

Rating: *****  [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

Ellen Birkett Morris pays attention to detail and always picks just the right word. Her poems are a joy to read and soulful. To read one of the poems in Surrender is to look into the heart.

Rating:  ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

Birkett’s poetry is homespun and elegant at the same time. Her bittersweet images linger in your mind and call you to reread.

–Lois Barr, Author of Isaac Unbound and professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College

Rating:  ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

In Surrender, Ellen Birkett Morris shows us love and loss from adolescence to age in images that pierce to the heart: a long-married couple makes love on “sheets / soft with age,” a daughter waves from her first school bus with a “purple gloved hand,” a poor man dreams “worn shoe-leather dreams.” These short poems sometimes seem deceptively quiet, but each shines as softly burnished as a pearl.

–Sherry Chandler, author of Weaving a New Eden and Dance the Black-eyed Girl.

Rating:  ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

 

 

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Surrender

by Ellen Birkett Morris

$14,paper

Ellen Birkett Morris is an award-winning, multi-genre writer based in Louisville, Kentucky. Morris is the author of LOST GIRLS, a short story collection, which Kirkus Reviews called “A varied set of tales from a skilled practitioner of the short form.”
Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, South Carolina Review, Fiction Southeast, Santa Fe Literary Review, and Upstreet, among other journals. She is the 2015 winner of the Bevel Summers Prize for her story “May Apples” and the Betty Gabehart Prize for Fiction. Her story “Like I Miss Being a Ballerina” was selected as an Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train Press Family Matters short story competition. “Lincoln, Maw and Shorty” received an honorable mention in the Saturday Evening Post fiction contest. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice. Her poetry has appeared in Thin Air Magazine, The Clackamas Literary Review, Juked, Alimentum, Gastronomica, 3Elements Review and Inscape, among other journals. Morris won top prize in the Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition and was a finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Morris’s plays have appeared in Mud City Journal, Monologue Bank, and Plays, The Drama Magazine for Young People. Her ten-minute play, “Lost Girls,” was a finalist for the 2008 Heideman Award given by Actors Theatre. “Lost Girls” received a staged reading at Cincinnati’s Arnoff Center. Morris teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky. Her essays can be found in trade paperback books including NESTING: IT’S A CHICK THING, THE WRITING GROUP BOOK, THE GIRLS’ BOOK OF LOVE, and THE GIRLS’ BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP, in journals including Brevity blog,The Common, The Butter, The Fem and South Loop Review, and on National Public Radio. Her interviews and reviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, New Orleans Review, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Reading Ireland, (Louisville) Courier Journal, Best New Fiction and Authorlink.com. Morris has an MFA from the Queens University-Charlotte low residency program. She has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Kentucky Arts Council, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She is the recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction, given by the Kentucky Arts Council.

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