Tupelo Press

Synopsis

Elena Karina Byrne is a teacher, fine artist, and full-time Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America. She currently runs the poetry reading series at the J. Paul Getty Center where she recently worked as a Poetry Consultant to the Getty Research Institute. Elena is also the Poetry Moderator and Consultant for the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, The Paris Review, The Colorado Review and Volt.

"Like Hopkins's kingfisher, Elena Karina Byrne's flammable bird takes off from the branch of human passion, though the heaven she is dwarn 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

Reviews

The Flammable Bird received a thorough, insightful, and boyant 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 off 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.