Elizabeth Kirschner’s “Twenty Colors” is a first book quite remarkable for its consistency and maturity of voice. The beautiful contradictions are conveyed with much poise, confidence, and courage as the poet maintains a stance that is once tough and tender, mediating between a gentle embracing of disappointment and mistrust toward any promise of paradise.

-Nance Van Winckel, Shenandoah

“In her debut collection, “Twenty Colors,” Elizabeth Kirschner offers a splendid chronicle of exiles and reprieves, a chronicle in which vision operates at the extremes of materiality, upon the flesh of everything.

-Donald Revel, Denver Quarterly

What fascinates about “Slow Risen Among the Smoke Trees is its overt delineation, through the medium of lyric poetry, of a distinct, linear narration. What makes this book a success is how Kirschner tells Lily’s story; the poems are powerful; and moving, with the plot not so much narrated as evoked. The real treasure is the wonderful last section, where Lily must come to terms with both her past and her present…all the poems work to create a Lilly who becomes real in our eyes and then transcends that reality, becoming, in the victory of her past, a moving symbol of human possibility in the face of any odds.

-Bern Mulvey, The Missouri Review

Praise for “My Life as a Doll.”

These poems are dark, iridescent beads strung along a narrative of embattled childhood that supports but never overrides the lyrical force of Kirschner’s voice and vision. The narrative begins with a mother’s violence and follows it effects upon the daughter’s inner landscape—the visions, the bouts of madness, the circling smoke of memory—as she grows older. It’s the landscape that generates the force behind these poems, rendered as is with stunning imagery at every turn and with urgent rhythms that push toward a kind of exorcism. These poems confront hard things head-on, but far from being sensationalistic or depressing, they are lush, fierce, and lovely.

-Leslie Ulmann

The bleak ferocity of Kirschner’s lines often to comes nigh to overwhelming this narrative of an abused childhood but the strength of imagery, a richness for which this poet is known, seizes the nightmares and transforms them into events that can be handled, shaped and put aside. No, not a happy ending but one that locates dignity and the forever force of life.

-Hilary Masters