Drowned Girl

Eve Alexandra studied theater at Sarah Lawrence College and creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She was featured as an outstanding emerging writer in The American Poet, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, in the fall of 2002. Other poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review and The Harvard Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Vermont.

“Rare in any age is work which incorporates a passion for experience, a commitment to truth, an ability to plumb the irrational, and a fluency in poetic language and music which can work through all these tangled thickets, but Eve Alexandra does just that. . . . This is true poetry; it immediately takes its place as a participant in the vast historical voice which composes poetry, a voice which contains ten-thousand tones, but which takes nothing unto itself which doesn’t resonate, as do the poems of The Drowned Girl, with authenticity and fervor.”—C. K. Williams, Judge“One of the things I find compelling about Eve Alexandra’s poems is that, while the narrator is seductive and beautiful, she is not pleasing. She does not offer comfort. She is not kind or solicitous. Like Ariel, who ‘performs the tempest’ for Prospero, Alexandra, too, is a tempest-ress: these are the storms and drownings of her own invention. Like Ariel’s bedeviling and gorgeous tunes composed to tease the sorrowful, these are poems of the taunt and tease, the razor in the apple.”—Lynn Emanuel“Something bright and reflective, something lucid and exacting glints at the center of this fleshy, original debut. Is it a needle? Is it a scalpel? Is it a scythe? Is it the switchblade a woman might carry in her purse? Eve Alexandra wields a tender, sharp honesty. The lines cut and dice, arc and glimmer in the light of her lyricism and intelligence. These poems will open you, make you bleed, make you wonder.”—Terrance Hayes