Home Water, Home Land. Hybrid poetry/nonfiction. Paperback. 168 pages. September 13th, 2022. ISBN 9781948800532.

Preorder. Item will ship before September 13th, 2022

In luminous and elegant prose, Katy E. Ellis explores home as noun and home as verb. This beautiful long poem—that often reads like a novel—guides readers through the history of a place divided by arbitrary boundaries, shedding language and laws as bodies collide. Wars and volcanos flicker in the backdrop: “You cross lines and things have different names.” Woven through vivid descriptions are pauses, gaps where Ellis stops to speak to her daughter, narrating the ways in which her daughter called her home. I love the openness of this poem, the poet’s curiosity and willingness to risk everything for rebirth. Speaking to her daughter: “What I mean to say is, I don’t believe it will be this way for you. I have to believe you’ll land in a different place, because you already come from somewhere else.” The gift of this gorgeous poem is an invitation to an emotional connection with a writer who challenges convention.

~Carol Guess, Sleep Tight Satellite