book view #1
Posted by Daniela Elza on May 15 2020
“Daniela Elza’s poetry book, The Broken Boat, is a full body immersion into the intimacy and vulnerability of relationship. Elza thrusts the reader into the visceral experience of a world in which everything is in constant motion; in which we are trying to find our footing in a seismically active landscape where the line between real and illusion, lived and dreamt, past, present and future, truth and lies is blurred, and nothing is what it seems.
Like tectonic plates, the inter and intra-personal dynamics are constantly re-arranging themselves—a real life Tetris game in which we can never let our guard down, and have to re-negotiate our relationship to everything and everyone around us. Laced through this churning, light shifts, breaks and shatters; circles morph into squares, the spaces between people grow wider while the people themselves are whittled down, and interactions are experienced through a thickening wash of grief.
Throughout, Elza also plays with her rising awareness of the ambiguity of words that may once have held the promise of certainty. We emerge a little disoriented, but also, somehow, staring into the face of…unlikely hope.”
—review by Ariana Salvo, reading the broken boat on Prince Edward Island
Thank you Ariana for this thoughtful engagement with the book.
