No, Don't

Elena Karina Byrne’s new chapbook, NO, DON’T, offers a restless portrait of identity that reflects the shifting terrains of desire and gender, of personal loss and punishing empowerment, and of political and cultural abuse. Under the influence of language's “steeplechase hours,” this book’s “carnal ambition” becomes a cinematic crash between fate and will as reality marries wild imagination. Each inventive poem turns perception into action and feeling into a musical art of attention as the poet travels between the past and the present, between conscious and unconscious thinking in order to tell a powerful story.

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Praise for No, Don't:

“Elena Karina Byrne’s new chapbook NO, DON’T hurls us into a muddy and kaleidoscopic garden full of grief, desire, unrest, and wild growth. Each poem seeks expansive vines of visceral feeling, twisting in the poet’s buzzing interiority: ‘Today, all memory ruins / downstream to the bee-swarm.’ Byrne’s language is rife with heart-bending synesthesia and elegiac musicality: ‘Mole ribs broke in the hard ground, the green canary lungs / were crushed by coal and a threshold torrent of deep sea / anchovies were made where we couldn’t see them school.’ Reading these poems, I am reminded of the voraciousness of imagination. Like ‘filling up the water with knives,’ this chapbook slices open the guts of fear, trailing with resilience.” —Jane Wong

Praise for Elena Karina Byrne’s poetry:

“If you are lucky enough to be bewitched by Elena Karina Byrne’s brilliant poems, then you will travel across time, space, and the ocean of language. In her beautiful new book, Squander, Karina Byrne again douses the reader in her sparkle and luminosity, through poems triggered by Shakespeare, Amy Winehouse, Georgia O’Keefe, and Rilke. There’s a driving breathiness and breathlessness in Karina Byrne’s poems, as if a voice is haunting your ear, unveiling what a genius mind might see and feel through language. This is Karina Byrne's deepest exploration of language yet; there’s no one writing like her and her voice is an essential one in American poetry.” — Victoria Chang, author of OBIT

”Like Hopkins's kingfisher, Elena Karina Byrne's flammable bird takes off from the branch of human passion, though the heaven she is drawn to is desire itself, "the sanctuary of hunger," the appetite that will not be fed. Enfleshed, inflamed, insatiable, these form her holy trinity, and the heady, headlong language of her poems has honored them with an artful liturgy of devotional wonders."
— Sherod Santos, author of Square Inch Hours

If I can’t have you, everyone else will,” begins Elena Karina Byrne’s Masque, an implosion of refracted and fractal selves. Wearing both the mask of Greek persona and the mascara of postmodern personality, these voices—whether moon or necropolis, vertigo or ventriloquist, Penelope or pen name, Rorschach or rant—revel in what one poem calls “this terrifying devotion to language.” Ancient, proliferative, profligate, and prophetic as language itself—“I am that greased machinery of heresy and hearsay”—these poems might have issued from the oracle at Delphi herself: “my flush crawl space in the mind/ Where, Ich Dien, I serve, am iamb slang-maid made to make you/ Sing my by-word, nay-word, password dance into the next/ World.”
— Angie Estes, the author of The Allure of Grammar

An interview with Elena Karina Byrne on Arizona Public Radio is here.