The Flammable Bird

About the Author

Elena Karina Byrne is a visual artist, teacher, editor, Poetry Consultant and Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and former 12 year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America. She has organized readings for the University of Southern California’s Doheny Memorial Library, the J. Paul Getty Center GRI, and the Chateau Marmont. Currently she is Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club and the Museum Of Contemporary Art’s Night Vision poetry programs. She is also working with the West Hollywood Book Fair’s Planning Committee and with Red Car studios on several short film projects including, Muse of Fire and Why Shakespeare?

Elena was the 2005 Poetry Co-Editor for The Los Angeles Review. She was one of three judges for the 2006 PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry. A ten-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Elena’s many recent publications, among others, include, The Yale Review, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Volt, Pool, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Verse, The Journal, Tri-Quarterly, Poetry Daily Anthology, Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry, Spunk and Bite: a writer’s guide to punchier, more engaging language and style, and Best American Poetry 2005. The Flammable Bird (Zoo Press) is now available through Tupelo Press & Consortium; as is her new book, Masque. Forthcoming works include The Fable Language (poetry), and Insignificance (essays).

Advanced Praise

“Like Hopkins’s kingfisher, Elena Karina Byrne’s flammable bird takes off from the branch of human passion, though the heaven she is drawn to is desire itself, ‘the sanctuary of hunger’, the appetite that will not be fed. Enfleshed, inflamed, insatiable, these form her holy trinity, and the heady, headlong language of her poems has honored them with an artful liturgy of devotional wonders.”— Sherod Santos

“Elena Karina Byrne’s The Flammable Bird is a powerful and exquisite colleciton of poems. Graceful and lyrically complex, this work invites us into the layered realms of consciousness, into both the sublime pleasures and the raw psychological densities of contemporary experience. Like the phoenix, Elena Karina Byrne lifts herself—and us—high above the ash of our dissappointments and regrets. A marvelous debut.”— David St. John

“Sometimes, when a gifted poet bides his or her time, their first book seems more like a fourth or fifth book. The Flammable Bird is like that: a book flung whole, utterly original, beautiful and seamless, upon the world.”— Tom Lux

The Flammable Bird received an insightful review from Marty Simon, which reads, in part: “Her best poems are mercurial and possessed, enjambing through a tumult of images and ideas that surprise and arrest. Even the poems primarily driven by formal experimentation exhibit substance and power. Byrne has crafted an excellent, surprisingly mature first collection of poems.” You can read the rest of the review here.


Reviewer Patty Seyburn posted this very gracious review on Amazon.com:

The Lineaments of (Gratified?) Desire
The density of Elena Karina Byrne’s work makes each read rich with possibility. There is a relentless quality to her poems—”Relentless, I love relentless,” she writes in “The Proportion of Broken”—that keeps the reader riveted. Byrne’s poems are catalogs of obsession balanced by a constant examination of language. The dominant currency is desire. This is poetry of the body, and the reader is doused in sensual apprehension and comprehension. These poems make the heart want to beat faster, and it cooperates, with pleasure.

Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-56-9