ELIZABETH CANTWELL reads from NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU

Nights I Let The Tiger Get You (Black Lawrence Press)

Elizabeth Cantwell's debut book of poems is a startling reminder of the range of voices to be found in the poetic landscape of Los Angeles. A can't miss reading for lovers of poetry.

Nights I Let The Tiger Get You is a neurotic journey through the surreal déjà vu of recurring dreams and the disorienting patterns of our own personal histories. The collection’s poems view the failures of a family’s internal structure through the distorted lens of the subconscious—but the language’s twists and turns ultimately open the narrator’s world to hope.

Praise for Nights I Let The Tiger Get You

“In her brilliant debut collection, Nights I Let the Tiger Get You, Elizabeth Cantwell excavates layers of contemporary anxiety to reveal that Blake’s Tyger has been, all along, that rough beast slouching toward us, and is in fact now living among us -- with an unsettling intimacy -- in both our unconscious and daily lives. Elizabeth Cantwell’s poems honor the disjunctions of voice and dislocations of consciousness present in our century, and their elegant and luminous shards glint in the darkness like the Tyger’s stripes. These exquisite reflections form a kind of handbook of post-apocalyptic forms, as the most psychologically fraught aspects of our dreams slowly emerge as the actual landscapes of our lives.”-- David St. John

“The surreal volleys in Elizabeth Cantwell's poems vividly capture the miniature catastrophes and cataclysms hidden within suburban America and its culture. Her poems 'Recess' and 'Interlude,' with their taut imagination, echo that horror in our lives to make something  happen. The tiger in these poems is real, synonymous with an unnamed anxiety, and roams at will through our haunted lives: ' we’re flying  / onto some other field of pistols. We have / more than one shot.' Her vision is unconventional and often brilliant.”--Mark Irwin

“Submerged in a burning sea of images, is the dreamer losing or finding herself?  "Fire self-replicates," yet she is "not a flame or a ripple."  Simultaneously bold and hermetic, these poems are ferociously interrogatory, seeking to distinguish between what can and cannot be saved.”--Claire Bateman

Elizabeth Cantwell is finishing her PhD in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her poems have recently appeared in such publications as Anti-, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, and the Indiana Review. Elizabeth’s first book of poetry, Nights I Let The Tiger Get You, was a finalist for the 2012 Hudson Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Her chapbook Premonitions is forthcoming from Grey Books Press. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and small dog.