In Alias Irene, acclaimed poet Elisabeth Murawski turns a blazing, unflinching eye toward the moments that shape us-those fragments of childhood, faith, family, and loss that echo long after they pass. With a voice both taut and tender, Murawski crafts poems alive with startling imagery and emotional precision: skies that “toss back black balloons,” purple crocuses that “survive late snow to die,” a little girl renamed over a carnival loudspeaker, claimed like a misplaced coat.
Across four seamlessly linked sections, Murawski moves between the intimately personal and the imaginatively far-reaching, drawing on landscapes from Hiroshima to the Sangre de Cristo mountains, from kitchen floors polished to a shine to the dark terrain of grief and memory. Her speakers navigate a world held together by an “invisible thread” of faith-one that strains, frays, and sometimes breaks, yet continues to bind.
Writing with the sculpted intensity of Emily Dickinson and the intellectual clarity of Anne Carson, Murawski invites readers to sit inside the questions her poems ask: How do we hold what we cannot keep? How do we live beside our ghosts? What do we name ourselves when the old names fail?
Alias Irene is a luminous, aching, and deeply human collection-an offering of grace in a world that often feels unsteady. These are poems that honor the fragile, resilient heart that keeps returning, again and again, to its longing for wholeness.
Elisabeth Murawski’s Alias Irene is another high point in this renowned poet’s writing life. With exceptional vision, she transforms family, history, art, and literature into lanterns that light the world in ways never seen before. One poem ends, “Her heart wanting the world to be enough.” This is significant because precise and elegant language make this world more than enough for poetry readers, Murawski’s beneficiaries.
Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate 2018-2023
With a “heart that knows its way in the dark,” Elisabeth Murawski offers us these taut poems fraught with grief. Hers is a landscape of uncertainty where the sky is “cruel, tossing back / my black balloons, / pulling from its sleeve / rabbits of cloud.” Startling imagery and a sense of our shared mortality run through these moving pages, with “purple crocuses / surviv[ing] late snow / to die.” Faith is the “invisible thread” holding her world together, but just barely: “I break the arms off the crucifix. / I wrap those arms around me / as far as they will go.”
Nancy Naomi Carlson, author of Piano in the Dark
Land, love, and loss lend images and inspiration to Elisabeth Murawski in Alias Irene; she curates scenes and questions strewn from the immediately personal and familial to the sympathetically imaginative, and the result is a moving collection that asks readers to be present in the poems, to sit with the questions they ask, and to “chew on [Murawski’s] words / with sensitive teeth” (from “On Reading a Chinese Poet”). The collection flows seamlessly within and between its four parts, and I found it difficult to put down, curious as to what sort of poem came next, drawn in.
Julian Kanagy, editor-in-chief of The Wild Umbrella
Elisabeth Murawski’s sculpted poems are one part Emily Dickinson, one part Anne Carson (Eros the Bittersweet), fully alive with ghosts, grief, and grace, not unlike Max Porter’s novel, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers. Gothic threads become switchbacks between faith and requiem. Love is a juggling act played out from Hiroshima to the Sangre de Cristo mountains. She understands life is about giving and taking away. But how does one keep grief at bay? Or death? Or time? Murawski’s answer is to open the gate and allow the blessings to fall like rain.
Richard Peabody, editor of Gargoyle Magazine
Elisabeth Murawski
is the author of Heiress, Zorba’s Daughter (May Swenson Poetry Award), Moon and Mercury, and three chapbooks, including Still Life with Timex, which won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Prizes for individual poems include the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Prize, the Graybeal-Gowen Award, and the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize.
Murawski has received thirteen Pushcart nominations. Originally from Chicago, she currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia.