Law of the Letter

By: Elizabeth Galoozis

Elizabeth Galoozis' debut collection challenges the limitations of language with an intimate and deeply personal voice that scrutinizes, illuminates, and slyly subverts words and names.

Law of the Letter traces what it means to integrate past selves into a realized self, and the tension between the natural rhythms of the planet and the human urge to organize and control. In seeking order from disorder, the poems apprehend such ungraspable forces as capitalism, the ocean, and depression. A child struggles to imagine her parents as human beings; an adult dissects nostalgia; and the pandemic and climate change wear down the carefully-wrought.

Law of the Letter draws inspiration from literature, media, and pop culture to yield new meaning from the familiar as the book grows into a more capacious love for the indescribable. Ultimately, Galoozis builds a meditative balance between the words we receive and the words we create.