In Alias Irene, acclaimed poet Elisabeth Murawski turns a blazing, unflinching eye toward the moments that shape us-those fragments of childhood, faith, family, and loss that echo long after they pass. With a voice both taut and tender, Murawski crafts poems alive with startling imagery and emotional precision: skies that "toss back black balloons," purple crocuses that "survive late snow to die," a little girl renamed over a carnival loudspeaker, claimed like a misplaced coat.
Across four seamlessly linked sections, Murawski moves between the intimately personal and the imaginatively far-reaching, drawing on landscapes from Hiroshima to the Sangre de Cristo mountains, from kitchen floors polished to a shine to the dark terrain of grief and memory. Her speakers navigate a world held together by an "invisible thread" of faith-one that strains, frays, and sometimes breaks, yet continues to bind.
Writing with the sculpted intensity of Emily Dickinson and the intellectual clarity of Anne Carson, Murawski invites readers to sit inside the questions her poems ask: How do we hold what we cannot keep? How do we live beside our ghosts? What do we name ourselves when the old names fail?
Alias Irene is a luminous, aching, and deeply human collection-an offering of grace in a world that often feels unsteady. These are poems that honor the fragile, resilient heart that keeps returning, again and again, to its longing for wholeness.
