Notes from the Dry Country

Poetry. What if your death was born with you when you were born, your shadow twin, and walks around with you wherever you go, to be released only when you die? What if fear mice run down your spine in the hospital, and then make a movie where the highlights of your life are left on the cutting room floor? What if your spirit drifts north on prevailing winds to Newfoundland, or hangs around in the clouds above Penobscot Bay? In NOTES FROM THE DRY COUNTRY poet Ellen Aronofsky Cole writes about the end of life in poems that draw on myth, fairytales, fantasy, popular culture, and brutal reality. In this world Henry the VIII might shop at K-Mart for a wife, and an angel might appear in your back yard disguised as a T-Rex and dispatch your nephew and niece.

In this collection Cole chronicles her experiences as a patient suffering from a rare blood cancer that she was not expected to survive, the bone marrow transplant that saved her life, and then broadens her focus to include the depression, anxiety, and an inescapable sense of vulnerability in this world that her experiences as a cancer survivor and a woman have left her. She also writes movingly about her joy in her husband and daughters, and how her family and dearest friends have drawn her back from despair. Cole's poems are fast moving and vivid, using forms that include classic blues, sonnets, dramatic monologues, prose poems, and free verse. Her poems morph and surprise, reality merges with dreams in a Chagallian collage of unexpected images, tenderness, humor, and the dark corners of the human soul.

"'Everything is a knife,' Ellen Aronofsky Cole's opening poem 'Excision' teaches in the enormously moving collection, NOTES FROM THE DRY COUNTRY. The poem speaks of a hard diagnosis, and of a maiden whose open mouth pours forth birds. Such a tension between surgical removal and miraculous release imbues her book with awareness at the cellular level. In all of these poems about the disappointments of the body and the body politic, 'the hardest task,' as she calls it in the short poem of the same name, is to go on: 'Try to look, to praise. / Here are your feet, your pants. The / task is to rise. You have not been mutilated.' I was deeply affected by these words and by so many of these poems, their tender wisdom and authority. Ellen Cole is a born poet, and NOTES FROM THE DRY COUNTRY is the fulfillment of her practice, which has been to coax our attentions from the way things ought to be, toward the way things are."--David Keplinger

"I have never read anything quite like these chatty, sardonic, death-haunted poems. With her quirky, deceptively girlish voice and uninhibited imagination, Ellen Aronofsky Cole leads the reader through some of the darkest regions of experience, through sorrow, depression and cancer treatment, calling up equal doses of outrage and antic humor, alternating between anger and tenderness. I admire the daring, go-for-it directness of these approachable, deeply human poems, how Cole's arresting imagery transforms the mind's dissociations under duress into what Robert Bly has called 'leaping poetry.'"--Jean Nordhaus

"There's a lifetime of facing up to the end of things in this thoroughly felt and richly understood first collection. These 'Notes' are so alive in detail, wit, honesty, and care as to elevate their hard evidence into something wonderful as well as valuable."--Stanley Plumly