Elsewhere, That Small

What People Are Saying

Sit and stay a while in the strangely familiar rooms and landscapes that Monica Berlin’s Elsewhere, That Small constructs for us. Let Berlin stop the clock, just for a few seconds, so we can take stock of “the ordinary seen & seen / -through” of our day: a doorframe warped by humidity or an over-pruned tree. Here, we weather cycles of loss and recovery; here, we dwell in the contrary senses of belonging and longing to be elsewhere. Berlin’s beautifully structured and incisive poems ask us to face—and to marvel at—the brute force of the world’s ongoingness. More so, Elsewhere, That Small offers a lesson on how to region here—that is, how to accept, how to endure—as Berlin writes, “Maybe / the only way to understand emptiness / wholly: to live in it.” —Emily Rosko

The contingency in Elsewhere, That Small is embodied by the sonnet form, its propensity to turn from abstract to concrete, map to memory “heavy-shaded by green.” It’s in the rhythm of Monica Berlin’s language, in iambs that sometimes strike in a clear pattern sturdy as a chair back before shifting “like some trick of maybe.” And yet: what is contingent in the form is inescapable in the fact of our being human. In these poems, we occupy spaces, patches of ground and perspectives that we may be so bold as to call our own. What a gift to be reminded of the view from where we’re standing, and how fleeting it is when the time comes to turn: “So I’ll give / it up again, say instead yours.” —Beth McDermott

This sequence of poems makes me consider the solitary expanse of the sonnet, how the span of fourteen lines opens up a zone through which a thought can travel nimbly its avenues. Intimate, contemplative, seeking out the smallest folds of language, Berlin’s verse leads us through estrangements and dismantlings, whose phrases disclose their “beautiful, hardness, their sharp edges & / sharper heave of near-careless care.” This book makes palpable a certain kind of nearness, an almost, an about-to-rise, like orchestral instruments tuning up. Reader, bring your listening. —Carolina Ebeid

MONICA BERLIN is the author of Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live, winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open; No Shape Bends the River So Long, a collaboration with Beth Marzoni, and winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize; and the chapbooks From Maybe to Region, Your Small Towns of Adult Sorrow and Melancholy, and with Marzoni, Dear So and So. A professor at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, she currently serves as associate director of the Program in Creative Writing.