Rinse
The title of Elaine Terranova’s eighth collection implies a cleanse, a refresh, not unlike the kind a body undertakes in sleep. Rinse charts inner landscapes in poems that read like memories surfaced in reflection and refracted through the lens of dreams.
As the poet enters sleep’s “dark passage” a synesthetic language emerges, in which sounds hold colors, and colors reflect sensations. “Clashing sounds splinter the air, a red bird’s worth of agitation,” she writes, “that or the sharpening thorns of roses.” The result is disquieting, at times dystopic, but ultimately transformative. The poems in Rinse are like prisms that we, her readers, pass through. On the other side, we are not the same.
About the Author
Elaine Terranova has published eight collections of poems, including Dollhouse, which won the 2013 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and most recently, Perdido. Her poems and prose have appeared in a number of literary magazines and anthologies and her translation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis was published by the Penn Greek Drama Series. Her awards include grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, NEA and Pew fellowships, and a Pushcart Prize. In 2021, her book The Diamond Cutter's Daughter: A Poet's Memoir was published.
