Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism. Her most recent nonfiction books are Any Person Is the Only Self and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays. Her other books include Normal Distance, The Word Pretty, and The Self Unstable. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared widely in publications including Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.

Praise

Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise.

—Make Magazine

. . . smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn’t so much distort as endlessly ‘reveal,’ like the panopticon eye of a camera.

—The Rumpus

. . . the dispassion about the self allows the writer to enact a number of equally lovely sleights of hand . . . Even while the author is drawn to image and reason, she is also in love with the vanishing point, where all perspective is ecstatically compressed into a single node.

—Gently Read Literature