Kahn’s poems are strategic attacks against mythic fictions like selfhood, gender, even the universal acceptance of scientific knowledge. But to characterize Kahn’s poetics as invested in “truth” would fail to highlight its multivalent relation to language as something that both delimits perception and serves as a vehicle of power. --The Poetics of Embodiment: Elaine Kahn’s ‘Women in Public’ Jeffrey Grunthaner in Hyperallergic
Kahn's precise and attentive debut full-length collection probes at notions of femininity with a sharp dagger, her terse but assertive stanzas carrying an understated conviction. "Listen, I'm not political, I am distracted," she proclaims, though her focused language will convince readers of her intelligence and savvy. -- Publishers' Weekly
Poems with a density as complex as the systems regulating the human body itself. However, where there could be claustrophobia, Kahn creates an opening, a portal for new meanings and definitions. -- “WHAT DOES THE WORLD HATE MORE/THAN WOMEN/IN PUBLIC”: ON ELAINE KAHN AND AN ODE TO HANNAH WILKE Alexandra Wuest in Entropy
A Celiene Dion song comes on the radio at the salon. It reaches the chorus and every woman mouths the words together. “Another one and another one” . Elaine is DJ Khaled. It is all of us in capitalism repeating everything over and over because our only commitment is to repeat until Elaine breaks it, “If I could break/ the hymen of his ear with/ I can’t stand you” --"To Know Elaine Kahn is to Spend Time in Her Bed" Laura Warman in Cosmonauts Avenue
more:
The Fader Magazine
American Micro Reviews
Scout Poetry
Kim Gordon "By The Book" New York Times
Kahn's precise and attentive debut full-length collection probes at notions of femininity with a sharp dagger, her terse but assertive stanzas carrying an understated conviction. "Listen, I'm not political, I am distracted," she proclaims, though her focused language will convince readers of her intelligence and savvy. -- Publishers' Weekly
Poems with a density as complex as the systems regulating the human body itself. However, where there could be claustrophobia, Kahn creates an opening, a portal for new meanings and definitions. -- “WHAT DOES THE WORLD HATE MORE/THAN WOMEN/IN PUBLIC”: ON ELAINE KAHN AND AN ODE TO HANNAH WILKE Alexandra Wuest in Entropy
A Celiene Dion song comes on the radio at the salon. It reaches the chorus and every woman mouths the words together. “Another one and another one” . Elaine is DJ Khaled. It is all of us in capitalism repeating everything over and over because our only commitment is to repeat until Elaine breaks it, “If I could break/ the hymen of his ear with/ I can’t stand you” --"To Know Elaine Kahn is to Spend Time in Her Bed" Laura Warman in Cosmonauts Avenue
more:
The Fader Magazine
American Micro Reviews
Scout Poetry
Kim Gordon "By The Book" New York Times
A VOLUPTUOUS DREAM DURING AN ECLIPSE is all sold out from folks at Poor Claudia so the PDF is now available for your downloading pleasure.
POOR CLAUDIA
POOR CLAUDIA
"Elaine's poetry blends colloquial tongue-action and rigorous academic formalism better than anyone I've ever read. There may be some similarities to Clark Coolidge at times, but she is definitely her own…uh…"man". She resolves contradictions inside her work with a clarity that feels far more effortless than it must actually be. And it provides a sort of Dionysian pleasure that should be negated by its clearly Apollonian form roots. "
--Byron Coley
"This is not the listless atemporality of the worldly and mundane — 'like doing laundry all day long / he is being nowhere' she says in the titular poem — but a conscious, creative and present force, where 'yesterday is gone” and Kahn’s poetry is free to “break / the hymen of his ear.'"
--Dan Hoy
--Byron Coley
"This is not the listless atemporality of the worldly and mundane — 'like doing laundry all day long / he is being nowhere' she says in the titular poem — but a conscious, creative and present force, where 'yesterday is gone” and Kahn’s poetry is free to “break / the hymen of his ear.'"
--Dan Hoy
CUSTOMER Ecstatic Peace Library / Glasseye Books 2010
"like one
of God's tiny miracles."
--best american poetry
"Customer has an eye for truth when truth is the moment after you spit gum in someone's hair and realization that you did it because you want to be their friend; how an ocean "spanks up" to your chest in the otherwise still of a perfect beach. The Customer sees the irrevocably fucked truths, and she candies them out like a clarity factory"
--Ally Harris, diagram
--best american poetry
"Customer has an eye for truth when truth is the moment after you spit gum in someone's hair and realization that you did it because you want to be their friend; how an ocean "spanks up" to your chest in the otherwise still of a perfect beach. The Customer sees the irrevocably fucked truths, and she candies them out like a clarity factory"
--Ally Harris, diagram
RADIANT BOTTLE CAPS
First Edition. Limited-edition mini-chapbook of 126 copies only, this is
one of 26 lettered copies signed by the author. Published in
conjunction with the No More Bush Tour of July, 2008. As new in stapled
wrappers.