overrun by wild boars

Maia Elsner grew up between Oxford and Mexico City, and began writing poetry while living in Massachusetts, USA. She was shortlisted for the 2019 White Review Poetry Prize and the 2020 Mairtin Crawford Prize for Poetry, and was commended for the 2020 Geoff Stevens Poetry Prize. A body of her work was anthologized in Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers (flipped eye, 2019), and her poems have been published in British, Canadian and American journals, including Magma, Wildness, Blackbox Manifold, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, among others. overrun by wild boars is her début collection.

“Maia Elsner’s overrun by wild boars is a tour de force of intelligence, passion, pain, memory and language. Her virtuosic use of received form as counterpoint to organic flow, lies at the heart of both the feeling and the intelligence. There are several histories and languages encompassed here, both human and creaturely, all pressing on the other to present us with a world as complex as our interdependence.” – George Szirtes; “overrun by wild boars is a wonderful book. These are elegantly subversive poems from a poet who is both formally inventive and has a keen perception attuned to the world around her. These poems travel from the body to landscape and grasp closeness in another language and all it seems effortless in her hands.” – Mona Arshi; “In overrun by wild boars Maia Elsner has created a work of wholly original fusion, moving readers through both locality and time. These poems read as complex, probing networks, charting and inverting the symbiosis between one world and the next. Bursting with imagery, argument, attention and balance, the poems in this collection are the kind you take with you into your life.” – Anthony Anaxagorou