Rooming with Elephants

Julie Weiss's collection Rooming with Elephants is suffused with love and terror. Nearly every poem clangs with this yin-and-yang of emotions, like a fire truck burning red with both emergency and promise. "Everywhere I turn, something beautiful stares / back at me, writhing, caught in the wires / of my mind," she writes in "What Am I if Not a Killer?" This poem's title alludes to the phantom killers and kidnappers stalking these poems, igniting Weiss's maternal fear in a world gone mad. She spars with these sinister shades, armed with relentlessly protective love for her children. Her voice is urgent, as if the world she loves were slipping away, no matter how hard she tries to hold on to it.

-Marc Alan Di Martino, poet and translator of Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell'Arco

In Rooming with Elephants, Weiss bends our gaze like a prism toward the larger world, daring the shadows that always follow light. There is vulnerability here, and courage. "I want them to hear a not-so-distant hunger," Weiss writes, "I need them to know what may come next." As mother and poet, Weiss shows us what she's learned to carry, in a moment, in a season that often comes calling with grief. "When I say I'll keep you safe," she says, "what I mean is, I'd move tomorrow"-and it's something every parent understands with a ricochet of knowing, of hunger and hope.

-Rebecca Brock, author of The Way Land Breaks

In Rooming with Elephants, Julie Weiss grapples unflinchingly with the weight of what it means to be a parent in our world. These poems resist the urge to "cleanse the air with sweet fables" and instead give voice to the realities of fear, darkness, and even despair with uncompromising candor. "No one showed me the lies / I'd rinse off my mouth / when I became a mother," she writes-and the gift of this collection is embedded in that honesty: each sharp line break, every raw confession, crafts a powerful portrait of a mother's clear-eyed devotion.

-Emily Patterson, author of To Bend and Braid