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