Blue in Green

Chiyuma Elliott

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226783918
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poems that address interpersonal connections while navigating life and care amid disease and disaster. Collaboration runs through the heart of this collection. Human relationships—particularly in families—shape the poems in Blue in Green, as they consider how the question of what we expect from one another evolves into a question of what we owe. When cancer overshadows the ordinary—engrossing the labor of love, work, and friendship—disease becomes a collaborator and proposes new rules of exchange.The forms of Elliott's works highlight reciprocity. Here you'll find ekphrastic poems that describe modern jazz songs, letters and letter fragments, and free verse poems in wildly variable line lengths. "When I was a wave, " the speaker repeats, each time telling a different story about intimacy and risk. Blue in Green moves through the struggle of processing the damaging interpersonal reverberations of racism, sexism, and environmental damage, while navigating intertwined personal and political incarnations of care. While a slow-growing disease burns its way through the speaker's body, these poems reveal the feeling of perpetually existing in the shadow of catastrophe and document the slow and strange process of coming to terms with that way of living.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• When I Was a Wave [I was willing]
• Last Will and Testament
• Never Mind Why
• Landscape is a word with fraught connotations
• Works on Paper
• The Lion-Wheel
• The Fox Emerging from Shadow
• The Winter Mirror
• I guess it must be the flag of my disposition
• If I Asked You To
• Blue in Green
• Tinder
• A Blessing Compared to a Window
• J-572 (431) I
• Composition No. 311
• Water, Water, Water
• Composition No. 152
• A Musical Sense of Life
• When I Was a Wave [The narcissus]
• Let me be just a little bit bitter so I remember:
• Dear Little Song,
• A Story about Longing
• Dear Past and Future Metastasis,
• My Throat in the Field
• I imagined all the place-names as code
• object state time space certainty
• The Play Within
• The Fire That Consumes All Before It
• Dear Ilium,
• A Letter
• A Program for Control of Of
• Dear Transformation,
• A Warning
• For Ghosted Girls
• Notes