this body/ that lightning show

About Elizabeth Gross

Elizabeth Gross is a poet and translator from New Orleans. She collaborated with artist Sara White on the chapbook Dear Escape Artist and co-translated and produced a new adaptation of Euripides’ Bakkhai at the Marigny Opera House. She teaches interdisciplinary humanities at Tulane University and co-organizes The Waves Reading Series, showcasing the work of LGBTQIA+ writers. Her work has appeared in a wide array of journals, including Fairy Tale Review, Okey-Panky, Painted Bride Quarterly, and TENDERLOIN.

Praise for this body / that lightning show

this body / that lightning show is a book of devastation and catastrophe, but also of beautifully calibrated, precise description in which the destruction of Atlantis and of New Orleans resonate off each other. Hers is a mythic world, but registered in a virtuosic plain style that is subtle, understated, and passionately faithful in its textures to the local world of her neighborhood, her own damaged family home, and the collective fate of New Orleans. You could call her a classicist, but her classicism is the kind that sees the wildness and strangeness in human behavior with a wise, tough eye, an admirable moral restraint, and a deep compassion and affection for human contradiction. This is one of the finest first books I’ve ever read.
—Tom Sleigh, author of Space Walk and Station Zed

Under the influence of Sappho and Sylvia Plath, in the spirit of Anne Carson and C.D. Wright, Elizabeth Gross’s first collection ceaselessly and successfully angles for an accurate, embodied vision of disaster, loss, and survival. Facing “a problem of memory,” which is also “a problem of address,” the lyric speaker interrogates the meaning of place while haunting the site of trauma—historical and contemporary—bringing the poet’s gaze to bear on trouble and sorrow, bringing, that is, the gaze of the one who neither denies failure nor lets go of the power to imagine a better, more loving future for all of us. I am moved by these lucid, vivid poems which balance intimacy with deep wisdom: this book will help to keep us alive through what is on us now and what is coming—“let it happen to me,” the poet says, “all of it”!
—Laura Mullen, author of Enduring Freedom and Dark Archive