Review: Elena Karina Byrne’s SQUANDER (Omnidawn, 2016)

Understanding is worship. Elena Karina Byrne’s third book of poetry Squander is no wastrel. A simple scan of the table of contents prepares the reader for a language map which travels from William Shakespeare, John Berryman, St. Augustine, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Georgia O’Keefe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jorge Louis Borges, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lewis Carroll, Marcel Proust, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, Theodore Roethke, Yoko Mishima, Virginia Woolf, Richard Tuttle, Giovanni Boccaccio…tighten your seatbelt.

Elena Karina Byrne’s SQUANDER (Omnidawn, 2016) was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.