The If Borderlands: Collected Poems [Paperback]

The first collection of poems spanning the beloved Canadian poet's short but dazzling career.
 
Elise Partridge’s poetry has been widely admired for its scrupulous truth to life and meticulous, glittering craft. Whether writing about family and friends, the natural world and the daily round, or serious illness, Partridge was, as Rosanna Warren has said, “a poet of brilliant precisions. Each line represents a new, glinting angle of thought. . . . The result is an art of eerie compassion and an almost hyper-realist perception of the small.”

This new collection includes all the poems that Partridge prepared for publication during her lifetime as well as a selection of uncollected or unpublished poems. Fortunately, the body of work [Partridge] left behind has been given a second life by New York Review Books...It's an astonishing book that should secure Partridge some readers outside the mossy parapets of the poetry world. Like all great poets, she deployed words in unusual and memorable ways. But she always aspired to be clear, even entertaining...Like Plath, Partridge, at her darkest, was blazingly vivid. Her poetry seemed made of magnifying glass, under which swam brilliant images and metaphors. —Jason Guriel,Elle

Friendship, houses, animals, new love—[Elise Partridge's] poetry made the most of these, as though early life’s eye was still present in certain places and moods. Elizabeth Bishop’s abiding influence is present here: Partridge’s poetry is the work of a consciousness feeling the variegated fabric of the world. —Anshuman Mody,Rain Taxi

The poetry world lost a bright source of formal and emotional dexterity when Elise Partridge passed away in 2015....I don’t know of any other poetry like this. Partridge’s ability to combine the purely imaginative with the sociopolitical is bracing...they are simply solid poems that point, if anywherelăŮ