Law of the Letter

Elizabeth Galoozis' debut collection challenges the limitations of language with an intimate and deeply personal voice that scrutinizes, illuminates, and slyly subverts words and names.

Law of the Letter traces what it means to integrate past selves into a realized self, and the tension between the natural rhythms of the planet and the human urge to organize and control. In seeking order from disorder, the poems apprehend such ungraspable forces as capitalism, the ocean, and depression. A child struggles to imagine her parents as human beings; an adult dissects nostalgia; and the pandemic and climate change wear down the carefully-wrought.

Law of the Letter draws inspiration from literature, media, and pop culture to yield new meaning from the familiar as the book grows into a more capacious love for the indescribable. Ultimately, Galoozis builds a meditative balance between the words we receive and the words we create.

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Law of the Letter is a journey toward a common language, with language itself as companion, confidante, vehicle, rearview mirror, fruit tree at the end of our wandering. Galoozis considers the rhythms of lineage and history, as well as contemporary interruptions of those rhythms-Western wildfires, the pandemic and its aftermath, our increasing technological enmeshment-with refreshing directness. These poems want to share, they want to explain, they want to pull us in, they want to exchange. "My body is mine," Galoozis writes, "but I wanted you to have it." In her hands, language is a thing to have faith in; a thing to build community with; a thing to fall in love with. It cuts through resignation and stagnation and cynicism; it helps us sort through what of our human legacy we want to preserve, and what we might be brave enough to leave behind. With these poems as our guide, may we, in Adrienne Rich's words, "reconstitute the world"; may we, in Galoozis's words, "make a table we all want to eat from."

-Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater

Law of the Letter invites us into a queer exploration of language, identity, and the liminal space between what is known and what is unknowable. The poems in this collection grapple with meaning making, beginning with the titular poem, the abecedarian "Law of the Letter," in which letters and words provide solace in a world laced with violence. The speaker knows that "Language cannot do everything," sometimes she even wants "to forget words," and yet it is through Galoozis' deft control of the line and lexicon that she brings us through the challenges of the past and present into a future in which it is possible to "hold each other's hands / and say, / we're / here / now."

-Sebastian Merrill, author of GHOST:: SEEDS