ULTRASOUND
“In lucid language and haunting images, Elizabeth Percer travels a path from loss to fulfillment, revealing much more than a simple narrative of grief transformed to joy. These poems investigate the nature of perception, the experience of technology-assisted imagination peering into a mysterious inner landscape.” — Nan Cohen, author of Rope Bridge
“In these compelling and ambitious poems, Elizabeth Percer interrogates ‘the murky significance’ of life: its genesis, tenuousness, and our hope for its very existence. As if arguing that life begins in the root of a word, Percer’s moving and miraculous poems echo with a curiosity both ‘tender’ and ‘invasive,’ and prove, by their primal and presumptive longing, that language itself can be umbilical: at once clinical and lyrical.”
— Robin Ekiss, poet and author of The Mansion of Happiness
“Elizabeth Percer’s Ultrasound is a book of surpassing beauty. It probes the despair of losing an infant before birth and also the joys of later delivering a healthy one. Medical details of pregnancy are conveyed in language that is lushly lyrical rather than clinical. An ultrasound is framed as ‘Let us play a game of clouds.’ One doesn’t have to have carried or delivered a child to feel awed by these poems — only to remember that each of us had to make the miraculous journey from darkness into light and air.”
— Susan Terris, Ghost of Yesterday, New & Selected Poems
“The birth of a child is a revelation, in this one day are all our days, it is happiness, it means to understand and the recognition of the chance one takes giving life. Everything else becomes irrelevant. Elizabeth Percer brings to her poetry the devastation of a miscarriage and the beauty of parturition. In her collection, Ultrasound, she writes, ‘And then they drew you out / half-blind, sugared with birth.'”
— Joseph Zaccardi, poet laureate of Marin County, California
“In lucid language and haunting images, Elizabeth Percer travels a path from loss to fulfillment, revealing much more than a simple narrative of grief transformed to joy. These poems investigate the nature of perception, the experience of technology-assisted imagination peering into a mysterious inner landscape.” — Nan Cohen, author of Rope Bridge
“In these compelling and ambitious poems, Elizabeth Percer interrogates ‘the murky significance’ of life: its genesis, tenuousness, and our hope for its very existence. As if arguing that life begins in the root of a word, Percer’s moving and miraculous poems echo with a curiosity both ‘tender’ and ‘invasive,’ and prove, by their primal and presumptive longing, that language itself can be umbilical: at once clinical and lyrical.”
— Robin Ekiss, poet and author of The Mansion of Happiness
“Elizabeth Percer’s Ultrasound is a book of surpassing beauty. It probes the despair of losing an infant before birth and also the joys of later delivering a healthy one. Medical details of pregnancy are conveyed in language that is lushly lyrical rather than clinical. An ultrasound is framed as ‘Let us play a game of clouds.’ One doesn’t have to have carried or delivered a child to feel awed by these poems — only to remember that each of us had to make the miraculous journey from darkness into light and air.”
— Susan Terris, Ghost of Yesterday, New & Selected Poems
“The birth of a child is a revelation, in this one day are all our days, it is happiness, it means to understand and the recognition of the chance one takes giving life. Everything else becomes irrelevant. Elizabeth Percer brings to her poetry the devastation of a miscarriage and the beauty of parturition. In her collection, Ultrasound, she writes, ‘And then they drew you out / half-blind, sugared with birth.'”
–Joseph Zaccardi, poet laureate of Marin County, California