Advance praise for Resurrected Body
“How high motherhood ranks among the muses poets keep returning to matters little to the challenge poets face: how to make it new? Sing, as Elizabeth Garcia does, from the mouth of mothers who have become ‘an archive, / evidence of all the bodies [they have] given / and received.’ Believe, as these speakers do, that what restores the body beyond the hope of resurrection is language, making words ‘a matter of sticks to gather up and burn.’ This is astounding work: funny, fractured, patient, as close to life and time as any parent is, watching her child at play: ‘one muscle of present tense, / her hair carrying / the light.’”
—Mario Chard, author of Land of Fire
“‘You will be spatchcocked / your sternum, your backbone scissored out,’ Elizabeth Garcia’s remarkable collection Resurrected Body begins. Clear-eyed and insightful, these startlingly honest poems examine what it means to be mother, writer, self, a body’s archive of memory, when even ‘firmament’ offers no safe ground, but ‘any moment / could swallow you.’ Still, through language, the natural world, and human connection, ‘the wide tent of each other,’ these poems seek a way ‘to learn // what resurrection must look like, / how lightning’s bright erasures / can bring you to the brink, and allow you, / again and again, to start over.’”
—Sandra Meek, author of Still and Biogeography
“In Resurrected Body, Elizabeth Garcia offers us one vivid version of what to expect from parenthood based on the experiences of both mother and child. ‘Here I bear every imaginable load,’ she writes in “Motherhood as Safety Coffin.” These poems weave together God, Mary Shelley, autobiography, and more, and the results are intriguing and surprising. I have no doubt that you will, like me, find yourself mesmerized by the stories and voices in this book.”
—Katie Manning, author of Hereverent and Tasty Other
Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s debut poetry collection, Resurrected Body, received Cider Press Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize, and addresses the challenges of recovering personal identity (and joy) amid the religious and cultural expectations of motherhood. Her work has or will appear in journals such as Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, Image, Third Coast, RHINO, Chautauqua, Portland Review, CALYX, and Mom Egg Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is a contributor to (and big fan of) Wayfare, Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets, former poetry editor of Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, and Segullah: Writings and Art by Latter-day Saint Women. A graduate of Brigham Young, she holds an M.A. in English from Valdosta State, and is beginning a mid-life journey as a Ph.D. student at Georgia State University. She resides in Atlanta with her husband and three children.