Hi-Res Front Cover
Back Cover
Table of Contents
Introduction by Aislinn Hunter
Page 35
Page 38
Page 47
Page 50

Daniela Elza on the web:
http://strangeplaces.livingcode.org/

Cover image
Abstract by Seth Elza

Poetry Lovers:
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milk tooth bane bone is part of Room Magazine's National Poetry Month reading list.

Details of upcoming events on the authors website: http://strangeplaces.livingcode.org/

April 2013 | 5.5 x 8.5 | 104 pp | 978-1-926655-60-4 | $16.95

milk tooth bane bone

by Daniela Elza

With an introduction by Aislinn Hunter.
               

These crows are mischievous ...

"Black words swooping across the snowy field, rips or tears in the fabric of space, the dark-winged protagonists in these pages are splintered shards of the self haunting the branches. Out of the ache of the present moment, Daniela Elza has crafted something spare and irresistible, an open armature for wonder."

—David Abram, author of Becoming Animal

Daniela Elza's milk tooth bane bone is a book that sweeps across the reader's consciousness like a bird's wing. The poems do something rather miraculous: fragmentary yet narrative, grounded yet mythic, they deconstruct and build simultaneously, forge and empty out meanings and images.

The landscapes and leitmotifs (crows, trees, winter, stories) that accompany us through the book work like refrains in a Wagnerian opera to give us a sense of both the transitory and the unchanged. Crows shape-shift their way through the paradoxes of language, personal mythology and poetic ecology, through landscapes and histories that, like the crows themselves, refuse to be tamed. These are poems that live wild alongside and within us; poems that suggest a way to place ourselves within our own mythologies, invite us to articulate our own way of being.

Daniela Elza has lived on three continents and crossed numerous geographic, cultural and semantic borders. Her work has appeared in over 60 publications both at home and internationally. In 2011 she received her doctorate in Philosophy of Education from SFU and launched her first e-Book, The Book of It. Daniela's debut poetry collection, the weight of dew, was published in 2012 by Mother Tongue Publishing.

She is writer in residence at the University of the Fraser Valley. Read in interview from The Cascade, UFV's Student Press here.

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Daniela Elza has uploaded a remarkable video poem from milk tooth bane bone here. The videopoem, crow morphologies, recorded in collaboration with Soressa Gardner, is an official selection of the 2013 Visible Verse Festival at the Cinematheque in Vancouver, BC, Canada, Saturday, October 12, 2013.

Review Quotes:

"One of the places Elza's poetry takes us is the abiding truth of this: if we have to be truly philosophical / we will not say / a word. Elza recognizes not only the power of words and the shape of language, but the strength of the silence in between." Al Rempel in Arc Poetry Magazine. Read the review here.

"It is a book you live with, you eat with, you walk to work with, and each time you take something new from it." Katie Stobbart, The Cascade. Read the review here.

"Daniela Elza's milk tooth bane bone is a lyrical testimony to the poet-philosopher's daily commitment to attentive wonder, heart-infused wisdom, and embodied courage, all devoted to the pedagogy of being and becoming in a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Like the crows she writes about from countless perspectives, Daniela opens up possibilities for words that startle me with new insights and hopes. When I read Daniela's poems, my mouth and heart and imagination all open up with a jaw-dropping shout of jouissance!"

—Dr. Carl Leggo, Department of Language and Literacy Education, UBC

"Elza's milk tooth bane bone is almost elemental in its purity. You hardly notice, at first, that these apparently fragmentary passages read with a clear narrative, insight and enlightening conclusions." Read the rest of this review by Michael Dennis at http:/michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/

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"An outstanding, deeply conceptual poetry collection by Daniela Elza - epistemology written in crows.

Open each word / as if it is a hand- / kerchief wrapped around bread. / and you are hungry.

"This duality-ridden blueprint, presented in one of the final poems, is exactly the one Elza uses to build this unique book. Highly recommended for all contemporary poetry lovers."

—Anatoly Molotkov (co-editor of the Inflectionist Review)