nathaneliaswrites

[nathaneliaswrites]

Fog is still shifting in, white, burning. Nothing is visible. And by now we are utterly lost. Let me revise that. I am lost. Suddenly pressingly alert I look around. No one is here but me. And there is no road.

Anne Carson, from Plainwater: Essays and Poetry; To Finisterre. (via xshayarsha)

[nathaneliaswrites]

In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound Collage by Nathan Elias

[nathaneliaswrites]

My longing was ruby-colored. I wore it around my neck, and everything was drunkenness and dance, every day a kind of drowning—

Zeina Hashem Beck, from “I Dreamt We Threw Bread Crumbs,” Louder Than Hearts: Poems (Bauhan Pub, 2017)       (via metaphorformetaphor)

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My poem “Learning to Drown” from my forthcoming chapbook Glass City Blues. Reblog with #GlassCityBlues for a chance to win a free copy of the chapbook! 

Poem first published here: http://www.sprylit.com/archives/issue-10/poetry/learning-to-drown/

[nathaneliaswrites]

How/ masterful and mad is hope.

Ada Limon, from “Outside Oklahoma, We See Boston,” Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015)

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Maybe desire is nothing but memory, And we dream only what has already been.

Tracy K. Smith, from Duende; “Astral” (via luthienne)

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“Tracery” from Before We Are Ghosts (2015) by Tan Lixin.This is a page from the book. 

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I will be holding a giveaway soon! Follow me on Instagram to find out how you can win a copy of Before We Are Ghosts.

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Find out more / Purchase the book / Want to know more? Contact me.

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#BeforeWeAreGhosts #LixinTan

Hop over to my Instagram for details on how you win a signed and personalised copy of my second book, Before We Are Ghosts!

This giveaway is available internationally!

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Glass City Blues: Poems is currently available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press. Reserve your copy here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/glass-city-blues-poems-by-nathan-elias/ 

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FINISHING LINE PRESS CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY:

Glass City Blues: Poems by Nathan Elias

$14.99, paper

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/glass-city-blues-poems-by-nathan-elias/

Nathan Elias is the author of the novelette A Myriad of Roads That Lead to Here. He grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and moved to Los Angeles, California where he wrote, acted in, and directed films such as The Chest (2015). Nathan earned his MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University Los Angeles in 2018, and currently lives in Tampa, Florida, where he aspires to teach creative writing. Nathan’s fiction, poetry, and films are available at www.Nathan-Elias.com

This potent chapbook is a much-needed blend of multidimensional description and resonant song. Featuring vivid poems and multi-media collages, Elias embarks on the ricocheting journey between geographic locale and the body, between city and soul, between memory and myth. This collection finds urgent ways to dually involve despair and vitality, doing so by inviting the reader into the core of its speakers’, characters’, and settings’ vulnerabilities, all while inducing the moments of earned redemption toward which the human heart pulls. –Marcus Jackson, author of Pardon My Heart “When a poet strikes a match / it burns starlight,” Elias writes, and Glass City Blues is all burning starlight. It’s shotguns pointed skyward, blues spilling from a bar, dyed-purple hair, the certainty of new love, a winter of desperation. An homage to both home and places wandered, Elias’ poems are written with the clarity only grief can foster: “play a tune that will bury the dead,” though the poems know such music is impossible. He writes, “I’ve come for the ashes. / I’ve come to bury / snapdragon / seeds.” But these poems are a reminder that what is lost lives with us, is preserved by our living, our listening, our looking back. –Ruth Awad, author of Set to Music a Wildfire Glass City Blues is nothing short of an evolution. A cross between the late Richard Hugo and the great L.A. poet John Harris, Elias knows what he’s made of. In his search for the bones of distant fathers under rocks in the Toledo fog, he has created a near perfect book, with an awful lot of heart. –John Dorsey, author of Letting the Meat Rest

PREORDER SHIPS SEPTEMBER 14, 2018 RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/glass-city-blues-poems-by-nathan-elias/#poetry

[nathaneliaswrites]

“So at this point I’m starting to regret that everyone hates me and how all I do all day is sit in the median, this like three-foot-wide strip of grass between six lanes of traffic, and pretend I’m writing in a notebook or pretend I’m playing guitar.”

-Kate Folk, “The Head in the Floor”, Tupelo Quarterly --> https://bit.ly/2uFedr

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I am sorry / to hold you again / for so long / I am in the mood / to be forgotten.

Hanif Abdurraqib, from For the Dogs Who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut (via kafk-a)

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Each morning I wake up a little crueler. Each morning my heart is

a vulture beating its wings for scraps.

Each morning it’s                                 happy birthday from the bottom of a river.

— Ruth Awad, from “Bassam,” published in BOAAT

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When the wound Is deep, the healing is heroic. Suffering and Ascendance require the same work.

— Terrance Hayes, from “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

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I felt myself becoming almost transparent with the subtle intensity of living.

Renée Vivien, tr. by Jeanette H. Foster, from “A Woman Appeared To Me,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

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Glass City Blues: Poems is currently available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press. Reserve your copy here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/glass-city-blues-poems-by-nathan-elias/

[nathaneliaswrites]

I want my body to be my body all the time not only when I’m alone

— Fayce Hammond, from “I Am A Wallflower At Damn Girl! Columbus 2015 Despite My Partner’s Insistence Otherwise,” published in Dirty Paws