PRAISE FOR CHORD BOX
"It’s hard to believe Chord Box (University of Arkansas Press) is the debut collection of poems from Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers. Not only is the voice mature, incisive, and wise, the narrative structure of the book is seamless and congruent, from the first to last poem. Chord Box is a collection of poems that are at once sexy, intimate, intelligent, and resonant…I will be humming these poems for a long time to come."
"Rogers displays an exceptional ear. Music and the evocative sounds of words announce themselves everywhere. While Rogers's language is subtle and lovely, it serves a greater goal: to reveal the complexities of a young woman's coming to artistic consciousness."
"The exquisite structures and beautifully realized harmonies of Chord Box belie the notion of "first book." Music--its seduction and discipline--is at the heart of these stunning poems that are themselves gorgeous with sound--their lines turned and tuned with such care they seem incised rather than written, composed with a scalpel. Place becomes palpable as entire landscapes--the Blue Ridge Mountains, Northern China--rise from the page, freshly figured and visceral. The language shines with specificity, and the poems manage this embrace of exactitude without sacrificing emotional reach. The erotics of knowledge evolve in a powerful coming-of-age sequence that is also the biography of an education. The moral shadings are subtle, the story fragmented yet legible as facets of power relationships--illicit passions, unsanctioned devotions--gradually unfold. Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers taught in rural China, and her poems that draw upon the experience brilliantly interrogate assumptions and press the grounds of understanding. Chinese logograms, as well as pictographs, glyphs, symbols, and rebus words from other cultural sources, enrich the quietude of a visual field shimmering with silence, sumptuous with implication. Throughout the collection, the struggle to learn a language-- whether Chinese, English, or music--becomes a means of voicing the charged territory between solitude and community, distance and proximity. These stunningly elegant poems also are toughminded and edgy: ponticello, played near the bridge, a position that yields "the rawest sound / on stringed instruments." As sensual as it is cerebral, Chord Box oscillates with gravitas and light: an indelible debut."
--Alice Fulton
"A stunning first book by a remarkably mature young poet, Chord Box deftly foregrounds both the language of sound and the sounds of language. The first sequence, weaving the often conflicted experiences of a guitar student and her teacher, uses the language of music to explore, through synaesthetic metaphor and other tropes, emotional and bodily territory. The final sequence takes the poet to China, where the sounds of a new language, as well as its visual representation, move her ever more deeply into emotional and linguistic complexities of equivalence, dissonance, and cadenced resolution."
--Martha Collins
"Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers draws her readers in, deftly and carefully, to embark on a journey of discoveries. Music is often her subject, and music constitutes her method: the music of storytelling, of pain and joy, of continual discovery and insight. With a sureness of touch and an economy of means, she gifts us, again and again, with stunning poems. This is a truly remarkable first collection."
--David Young