Artesian Well

With tenderness and clarity, C. Malcolm Ellsworth documents what lies above and below the surface. Using the Midwestern landscape, she fearlessly navigates a topography of love, violence, regret, and forgiveness – and unearths whatever it is that seeks to be revealed.

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Praise for Artesian Well

In life, we live with what has passed. In art, we make the past the present. We make it a gift. In Artesian Well, C. Malcolm Ellsworth presents us with love, lost love, regret, hope and strength. Farm girls write “on rocks / with rocks,” write on “wood / with ashes.” Like the poet, they use the material to make the material. In “Chocolate Cake,” Ellsworth bakes up a domestic “sheet.” By the end, the poem, like the cake, “splits, just a little / in the middle, and feels springy like flesh, / and a toothpick stuck in the center / comes out clean.” These artful poems, fleshed with the particulars of ordinary life, come out clean.

–Thomas Fox Averill, author of rode and Secrets of the Tsil Cafe

“Man, is she good. Allie Marini Batts writes with a dream-fevered style that is both sharp and poised, and as all great poets should, makes the reader her bitch.”

—Brian A. Ellis

Ellsworth’s Artesian Well reveals the dirt, both emotional and physical, of country living – the volatile, abusive husbands; the killers; the preachers. But here also is a book of beauty – of horses, of maidenhood, of desire blossoming like a chrysanthemum. Full of vivid insider details and stark images, this is a collection you won’t want to put down.

–Kevin Rabas, author of Sonny Kenner’s Red Guitar

About the Author

C. Malcolm Ellsworth’s work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Flint Hills Review, Scissors and Spackle, Blue Island Review, Stone Highway Review, and online editions of Everyday Other Things, Montucky Review, and The Medulla Review. The poem Wild Girl, Winter was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. She has a BA in English and an MFA in art from the University of Iowa.

Artesian Well

Praise for Artesian Well

About the Author

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