Poetry by Elaine Equi
November 1, 1994 • 6 x 9 • 80 pages • 978-1-56689-026-7
“In Elaine Equi’s brilliant Decoy, each poem is a ‘neatly folded labyrinth.’ Here everything is artifice—like the labyrinth, a deadly little joke, one we’re ‘in on’ until, suddenly, we’re not so sure. The poems in this book are both spooky and spoofy. Eventually we realize that, despite its campy, B-movie trappings, the monster (our world) is real. We realize this gradually because of Equi’s light touch. Like Muhammed Ali, she floats while stinging.” —Rae Armantrout
About the Author
Elaine Equi, author of Click and Clone (Coffee House Press, 2011), was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and raised in Chicago and its outlying suburbs. In 1988, she moved to New York City with her husband poet Jerome Sala. Over the years, her witty, aphoristic, and innovative work has become nationally and internationally known. Her last book, Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and on the short list for Canada’s prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize.
Among her other titles are Surface Tension, Decoy, Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Award, and The Cloud of Knowable Things. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Nation, and numerous volumes of the Best American Poetry. She teaches at New York University, and in the MFA Programs at the New School and the City College of New York.
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