
A dead family picnics on a riverbank. A doll becomes a human lung. Tinged with menace and the uncanny, the poems in Spit Valve ask: how can we live alongside an unspeakable past? Eve Ellis’s vivid worlds of lost girls, claws, throats, ice and Americana are intricately conjured here with linguistic bravura and beguiling skill.
“Girls are plunged into silence, looking for their mouths in the water. Mothers weep as their daughter speaks, mouthing the words. The girls from our past see us talking, fully-grown, and wonder how (and if) we found the words. Silence protects and harms simultaneously, and Eve Ellis’s poetry - with its eloquent mystery - contains this paradox: how to say without saying, blame without naming, express without losing the secrets that have stitched us, and our families, together for so long. A frankly massive achievement.”
Caroline Bird