Books by Elena Rivera

Epic Series brings together three long poems by Elena Rivera previously published in small press limited editions. These poems delve into the complexities of becoming and into what it means to be from more than one world, where memories, languages and stories are carried and swallowed up by much larger histories.

In The Perforated Map, Elena Rivera's guide is language as she attempts to navigate the distances, the disturbances, the suggestions, the mistakes, the perforations. In these poems, language is the map, the matter that fills/affects the body, the organizing principle between the self and the world, and the forms that it gives rise to.

A remarkable sequence of sonnets that reflect contemporary daily life in New York CityScaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, Elena Rivera uses the English sonnet as a scaffold to explore daily events, observations, conversations, thoughts, words, and memories-and to reflect on the work of earlier poets and the relationship between life and literature.Guided by formal and syllabic constraints, the poems become in part an exploration of how form affects content and how other poets have approached the sonnet. The poems, which are very attentive to rhythm and sound, are often in conversation with historical, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources. But at the same time they engage directly with the present moment. Like the construction scaffolding that year after year goes up around buildings all over New York, these poems build on one another and change the way we see what was there before.