Arnold Publishes Her Third Book; Receives Lowell Scholarship

Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Arnold comes out with a new book and a major award.

Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Arnold's third volume of poetry has just been published by Flood Editions. Effacement is a powerful sequence of poems that think about the wounded body. Effacement addresses such difficult topics as disfigurement, surgery, war, and cancer.

"In this remarkable new book, Elizabeth Arnold focuses on what certain bodies undergo against forces that efface them. Physical law has it that ‘what pokes out gets hit.’ Limbs, noses, and jaws are blown off. There are mastectomies. Prosthetic reconstruction is ‘flesh displaced.’ Some of those who experience it learn that there is now between them and the ones they love a wall of cancelled desire. ‘One can adjust to this, they say, but not // from it.’ ‘On the outside,’ some lose the ability to feel // glad to be alive.’ Losses such as these italicize how unlikely it was to begin with that any soul should ever have made its way into a body out of the oblivion that precedes birth. Death too is that oblivion. Its ‘fingers’ open the face out of which ‘something // inner joins the surface’ as soon as the eyes ask for help," writes James McMichael.

Arnold was recently selected (from almost 400 applicants) winner of the 2010-2011 Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship. This award, which is adjudicated by a member of the Harvard English department, along with two nationally prominent poets, is well known in the poetry world and has been won by some of the country's most distinguished writers. Past winners include Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Bly, Phillis Levin, and Adrienne Rich. The single requirement of the award is that the winner must spend the twelve months of the award outside the United States.

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