Overview

Shame has kept so many women's stories silenced, with a cultural lineage of lack that asks women to give up their own desire while simultaneously performing cultural expectations of desire for others. Part excavation, part interrogation, and part subsequent untethering from this inheritance, the poems in Ellen Kombiyil's magisterial Love as Invasive Species recognize that gender, class, capitalism, and legislation compound these issues that have stalked women for generations.

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9781960329608

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"""Ellen Kombiyil writes out of the unsettling complexity of how we see ourselves and others changing from generation to generation. From grandmother to mother to poet daughter, Kombiyil voices the shifting manners and morals of working class women as they struggle to come to terms with their own sexuality, child-rearing, domestic life, the world of work, aging, illness, physical debility, and death. Everything is put to the test in these poems, particularly the poet's own ethical understandings as refracted through her memories of childhood and adolescence. But her ambition doesn't stop there: she's like Keats in her desire to live in a world of unmediated experience, in which verbally realized sensations deliver reality whole."" -Tom Sleigh, author of The King's Touch, winner of the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize ""Ellen Kombiyil's Love as Invasive Species follows the shames and silences through matrilineal lines. From primers on girlhood, to a coming of age's commandments on what not to do to stay safe, Kombiyil explores the familial lessons on gender, class, and power. These inheritances sit like ghosts on the tongue until the needed prayers can be spoken and the unwritten stories given language. The poems excavate the layers of memory to discover if love is taught, inherited, or something invasive."" -Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas (2023-2026) ""Ellen Kombiyil's Love as Invasive Species offers absolution in the subtlest of moments: a wallet with only a nickel in it, a lover's yakety yak, incidents from a vanished world accessorized by lo-riders and johnny gowns, made meaningful by the weight of memory and the poet's keen, rigorous attention. Consider this a double album of anti-nostalgia: the story and the flip side/s of the story, together making up a memoir in verse that skillfully blends the narrative and the lyric. Kombiyil's gorgeous language is a tribute to the flawed workaday heroines of a lineage: 'Those lilies you nearly crushed, ' who endure near-biblical proportions of suffering and awe, and whose ecstasies reverberate through the generations 'like knuckles.'"" -Minal Hajratwala, author of Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment ""The poems in Love as Invasive Species take on generations of women, the traumas they inherit, and the traumas they pass down. One can feel the collection's speaker willing through words a correction to this pattern while also honoring from where she came, all the while staying brilliantly open-eyed and open-hearted. Designed in two sections that speak back to one another across generations, this collection does what we always hope poetry will do, which is to leave us both companioned and changed. Ellen Kombiyil has written a gorgeous book of resilience, hope, and love-especially love."" -Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik"

Author Information

Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook, Avalanche Tunnel (2016). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Pleiades, and Ploughshares.She is a 2022 recipient of a BRIO Award (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) from the Bronx Council on the Arts, a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize, and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer's poetics. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter's MFA program, she currently teaches writing at Hunter College.

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