LOCAL VIRGIN of IMPRESSION
by Ellen Boyette
available Sept 20, 2025
This full-length collection compels and eludes as it draws the reader through a series of psychic landscapes. The speaker tells us she is “coming down with it for real,” as tonal registers shift and absorb, moving from personality to persona, and from a state of play to a sense of threat. Fragments of autobiography appear which hint at an unnamed disaster, leading us among hairshirts and hunted hinds, dream batteries and rococo memes. All throughout, a quarrying, feral mind is located beneath the artificial, game-like surfaces of contemporary life. And in locating this depth, and by enlivening our language there, the poems extend a mysterious grace: in being so wildly themselves, their dreams feel somehow like our own.
56 pp. / 8.5 in. by 8.5 in.
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Our conversation with Ellen is forthcoming. Check back soon!
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$18.00
Ellen Boyette is a poet and essayist whose work is interested in the occult, the internet, and objects real or imagined. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of two chapbooks, NITROUS OR MY VELVET KNIFE (Secret Restaurant Press, 2024) and CUFFING SEASON (The Creative Writing Department, 2023). Her work can be found in Poetry Daily, poets.org, The Columbia Review, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Bennington Review, Prelude, and elsewhere.