The first collection of poems spanning the beloved Canadian poet's short but dazzling career. Essential reading for anyone interested in 21st century poetry.
Elise Partridge (1958-2015) is the author of the poetry collections Fielder's Choice and Chameleon Hours, which won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award. The Exiles' Gallery, her third poetry collection, published in April 2015. Throughout her career, her poems appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Poetry, and The New Republic.
"Fortunately, the body of work [Partridge] left behind has been
given a second life by New York Review Books...It's an astonishing
book that should secure Partridge some readers outside the mossy
parapets of the poetry world. Like all great poets, she deployed
words in unusual and memorable ways. But she always aspired to be
clear, even entertaining...Like Plath, Partridge, at her darkest,
was blazingly vivid. Her poetry seemed made of magnifying glass,
under which swam brilliant images and metaphors." —Jason Guriel,
Elle
"Friendship, houses, animals, new love—[Elise Partridge's] poetry
made the most of these, as though early life’s eye was still
present in certain places and moods. Elizabeth Bishop’s abiding
influence is present here: Partridge’s poetry is the work of a
consciousness feeling the variegated fabric of the world."
—Anshuman Mody, Rain Taxi
"The poetry world lost a bright source of formal and emotional
dexterity when Elise Partridge passed away in 2015....I don’t know
of any other poetry like this. Partridge’s ability to combine the
purely imaginative with the sociopolitical is bracing...they are
simply solid poems that point, if anywhere, back into the shared
histories of poetry and language, and that is our true loss: a poet
with a clear-eyed sense of her tradition and how that tradition
also rides the edge of the future. In the end we’re left with the
work. And it shines." —Daniel Rzicznek, The Literary Review
"The If Borderlands, which collects the majority of the poems
Partridge wrote during her lifetime, makes her achievement
impossible to ignore.... Many of these poems may be written from
the sickroom, but the poet opens her senses wide, leading to a rush
of color—'Red digits blink: morphine drip / Chest a gauzy
snowpatch, itchy with tape'—and a scramble to find a way to capture
it all." —Carmine Starnino, The Walrus
“In their ample, embracing, nuanced appetite for sensory
experience, [Partridge’s] poems achieve an ardent, compassionate,
and unsentimental vision.” —Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post
“Partridge’s impressive poems pursue a careful thinker’s yearning
for abandon, a loyal friend and partner’s wish for change.
Attentive to fact, to what she sees and knows, Partridge
nonetheless makes space for what is wild, outside and with us—for
the fears and the blanks of chemotherapy, for sharp variations
within (and without) frames of meter and rhyme, and for the welcome
consistencies of married love. She has learned detail work, and
patience, from Elizabeth Bishop, but she has made other virtues her
own: riffs on familiar phrases open startling vistas and even her
love poems get attractively practical. Hers is a welcome
invitation: let’s listen in.” —Stephen Burt
“Partridge is a technical wizard for whom thinking and feeling are
not separate activities. She is a hawk-like observer of the
particular...many times ascending to pitch-perfect verse.” —Ken
Babstock, The Globe and Mail
“Elise Partridge is a poet of brilliant precisions. Each line
presents a new, glinting angle of thought. [Her] poems—good, tangy,
and chunky on the tongue—somehow reflect life’s plenitude while
maintaining their own spareness and balance. The result is an art
of eerie compassion.” —Rosanna Warren
“There is no cynicism or pretension here, only the authenticity
that comes from careful study of both word and world.” —Stephanie
Bolster
“A fully formed voice speaks in these poems that invite us to share
their closely observed particulars—a hospitable voice, full of
intelligence, good humour, candour, engagement. Each poem commands
attention. Exemplary.” —Robyn Sarah, National Post
“Reading [Partridge’s work], I find myself marveling at the luck of
each person, place, thing, or circumstance, to have Elise
Partridge’s exquisite and precise attention. And how lucky we are
to get to listen in as she offers each of them her flawless ear.”
—Jacqueline Osherow
“Elise Partridge brings the most mundane moments vividly to life.”
—The Vancouver Sun
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