Masque

About the Author

Elena Karina Byrne is the author of Squander (Omnidawn 2016), MASQUE (Tupelo Press, 2008), and The Flammable Bird, (Zoo Press 2002), as well as the former 12 year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America and recent final judge for the Kate and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards. She is a freelance professor, editor, Poetry Consultant & Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club.

Her book reviews and poetry publications, among others, include the Pushcart Prize XXXIII, Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Slate, Volt, Diode, Poetry International, Ploughshares, OmniVerse, Verse, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Black Renaissance Noire, Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry, and BOMB. Elena just completed a collection of essays entitled, Voyeur Hour: Meditations on Poetry, Art & Desire.

Advanced Praise

“The Greeks’ highest compliment to Odysseus was to call him ‘myriad-minded.’ Shall we say of Elena Karina Byrne’s amazing sequence that it is ‘myriad-masked?’ By turns poignant, intricate, ingenious — Byrne’s poems explore and dramatize the theme of mask into a multiplicity of insights and imaginings almost as rich as consciousness itself.” — Gregory Orr

“Ancient, proliferative, profligate, and prophetic as language itself— ‘I am that greased machinery of heresy and hearsay’—these poems might have issued from the oracle at Delphi herself…”—Angie Estes

“Instantly ticklish and slowly narcotic, the language of Elena Karina Byrne’s curious index of masks in her book nearly confounds the rigour of its ancient form, the poetic catalogue. Yet one cannot help but trail the voice threading through these veils made of words, as once Luciferian and terribly vulnerable to its own power, as it escorts the reader, and abandons her, into a dappled space reminiscent of one of Tolstoy’s great Russian balls—a social and erotic prospect distilled to meteoric gestures. One can only yield to the naked hermeticism of this book” — Daniel Tiffany

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-57-6