The Invisible Suitcase by Elaine Olund

The Invisible Suitcase, Elaine Olund’s debut collection, presents the poet’s world using the deft brushstrokes of the artist she also is.  “There’s a word for everything’, Olund tells us in one of several short poems exploring botanical terms; “this one means ‘grow toward light.’” This book shimmers with the light of life all around us. Whether the poet’s light shines on the image of wilting carnations—“So white. Dirty-edged though, like snow / charcoaled with car exhaust”—or on a mother who is “gray-tired/lost in a haze of Parliament smoke”, these poems are rendered in full color, with images both fully themselves and bright windows into the human experience.

–Pauletta Hansel—Cincinnati Poet Laureate, 2016-2018

Elaine Olund’s debut poetry collection, The Invisible Suitcase, twines around roots, growing towards the light, and letting go. Memory’s roots burrow deep as the tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike “plunge…” her “…into darkness.” Olund uses marcescence, the botanical process of holding on to old foliage, thwarting new growth, as a metaphorical warning. The speaker mourns loss while cutting into a strawberry, “slicing these little hearts wide open.” Copper, a favorite color, morphs into a penny rolling out of reach, like a lover “no longer worth reaching for.” Finally, releasing memories too tightly held allows the speaker to make a “Packing list for a new life,” as “into the invisible suitcase, breath folded/neat as a silk scarf.”

–Ellen Austin-Li, author of Firefly, Finishing Line Press, 2019.

For me a good poem is either a sort of controlled explosion or a journey. Olund has both kinds of poems in this collection. Some, like “Watching Carnations Wilt,” have to be reread, danced with, as they slowly give up their secrets. Sharp images rise up, sink, and then re-surface.  The Invisible Suitcase will take you to deep and real places and when you return to your life and the room and the book in your hands, everything is familiar, but richer and realer—strawberries are cut and hearts, bleeding.

–Howard Wells—Editor & Book Developer