Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak

Book excerpt: "Elizabeth Knapp's poetry explores the intersections between modern society, personal mortality, and cultural immortality. In this, her second collection, celebrities come and go, while the collection's patron saint, Emily Dickinson, presides over all. At its heart, this book is about loss and its endless reverberations, while at the same time, it embraces the notion of art as a kind of immortality. With these striking new poems, Knapp establishes herself as one of our most vital and compelling contemporary voices"--