Album of Not

More about the book

Eve Linn's debut collection, Album of Not, examines the female experience through poems that channel women whose lives defied the patriarchy: Frida Kahlo, Sarah Bernhardt and Francesca Woodman. At its heart Album of Not concerns itself with the not - not what never existed but the excision of what existed: "Excise the image. / Leave only a perfect silhouette." The speaker is "the scribe of battered stars" who has to memorize her own son and buys a photo album "...to pretend / I had a past." This remarkable collection confronts the perpetuity of loss through poems that are often surreal and always arresting. - Cindy Veach, author of Her Kind