Girl in a Forest

Elline Lipkin's Girl in a Forest explores the roles and tropes of women at different life stages, filtered through the lens of the Brothers Grimm tale of Hansel and Gretel. These poems lay a trail of breadcrumbs through permutations of grief as a mother realizes her mortality, a girl awakens to possibility, and an elder reckons with loss. Lipkin invites the reader to step into the enchanted, "the grip of night, / a swarm of marble /feelings set / inside a storm" and to question, reinscribe, and reverse the tensions of womanhood in both the fairy tale and contemporary life.

Elline Lipkin is a poet, nonfiction writer, and academic. She holds an MFA and PhD in Creative Writing and Literature and has been a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley and a Research Scholar with UCLA's Center for the Study of Women. Her first book, The Errant Thread, was chosen by Eavan Boland for the Kore Press First Book Award. Her second, Girls' Studies, is part of the Seal Studies series. She has been in residence at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and was a California Resident at Yefe Nof. She has served on the selection committee for the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards. A past mentor with AWP's Writer to Writer program, she is active with WriteGirl in Los Angeles and writes for Ms. magazine. For two years, she served her community as Poet Laureate and editor of the Altadena Poetry Review.