Dragonfly Puzzle Box
In Dragonfly Puzzle Box, Elya Braden’s luminous poems shine a healing light into the spaces of a life lived in pieces. From an early marriage born in hope and dissolved in divorce, a motherhood forged in the shadow of a flawed mother, to the rediscovery of self in the many-mirrored hall of relationships, each poem is a fragment of strength, a portrait of resilience. Like a kintsugi bowl, these poems celebrate the cracks, and answer the question: how does one create a
life of beauty and purpose out of what was broken? The poet’s words are the molten gold connecting the past, mending the present, and illuminating a future of creativity, joy, and love.
IAdvanced praise for Dragonfly Puzzle Box:
Dragonfly Puzzle Box is a container for iridescent poems of a woman’s soul as she struggles to reach freedom, startling poems of lyrical brilliance and trouble, poems that illuminate the wound of being human along with the mystery of confluence—woundedness and beauty intertwined. As Adrienne Rich said in "Diving into the Wreck," The words are purposes./ The words are maps./ I came to see the damage that was done/ and the treasures that prevail.
—Marsha de la O, author of Creature
Trigger Warning— here you will encounter husbands-to-be, ex-husbands, lovers, other lovers, and reflections on family, both specific and universal. Sharon Olds describes her poetry as “apparently personal.” With their charged language, jeweled images, their griefs and erotic variety, I’d describe the poems of Dragonfly Puzzle Box as Dazzlingly Personal.
—Suzanne Lummis, author of Crime Wave
poems from Dragonfly puzzle box
From “Measuring the Volume of My Absence"
It’s cool here
under the earth, darkness
blessing the stars.
Coal crushed,
I am diamonds.
From “Milk & Skin”
In that moment I knew
that there were worlds beyond worlds,
that inside my heart,
galloping fast, faster now,
was a secret, dormant
as a bulb wrapped in newspaper
and rubber bands, hidden
in a rusted garage refrigerator,
until planted in the dark earth,
waking to the fingertip call
of the sun, the ground covered
in a pink confetti of cherry blossoms.
From “When Joy Comes”
Risk the ricochet of fate,
taunt the gods
with your raucous joy!
If we are to lose everything in this life,
and for sure we will
with our last breath,
then let us rejoice:
blast the trumpets,
dance and love.
from “Dragonfly Puzzle Box”
Honeyed mystery of mahogany,
oak, walnut, teak, Fall’s tawny
offerings sanded into curves,
smooth invitation to touch,
like the sun-warmed thigh
& rising hip of that sunbaked
young woman you once were,
drowsing on a black sand beach
in Santorini, water beading
on your belly.
from “Every blackberry returns me”
Forever could be
those moments, purple jewels I'll caress years later,
like worry beads between troubled fingers,
filling housebound days that drag with heavy
feet. My heaven is spun from those days,
those vines, weeds by any other name,
burned and banished but never vanquished,
Mother Nature insistent on her dark joy.
Semi-finalist in FLP’s 2021 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition
In The Sight of Invisible Longing, Elya Braden unfurls a powerful tapestry and evocation of the depth and polarities of the human psyche… Braden’s language is musical, brave, and incantatory on this empathic journey of love, grief, and loss. The poems task difficult subjects, maternal inadequacies, and the tangled consequences of our yearnings.
~Cynthia Atkins, author of Still-Life with God
In The Sight of Invisible Longing, Elya Braden draws us—heart, bone, and breath—into a life of harrowing and hallowed arcs, carrying us through each dark night of the soul with rigorous poems of insight and grace.
~Michelle Bitting, winner of the DeNovo, Sacramento Poetry Center, Catamaran, and Wilder book prizes, including Nightmares & Miracles 2022
Elya Braden is an astonishing poet, and this new collection of ten, linked poems based on Rilke’s Duino Elegies is proof. Illustrated by Braden’s powerful art, these poems both awe and devastate as they chronicle the poet’s transformation from destruction into power.
~Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of EROTIC: New & Selected, poetry editor, Cultural Daily.
In The Sight of Invisible Longing, we encounter the remaking of the self after severance—what happens, in this case, when a woman, long-coupled, uncouples and finds herself at sea.… All of this, too, to describe what it takes and where one must go to construct a new self after the loss of intimate identifiers like wife and mother.
~Sonia Greenfield, author of Letdown
Chosen as Sundress Publications' The Wardrobe's Best Dressed January 2022
Open The Fist is a powerful collection of poems about truth-telling, violation, and healing. Elya Braden’s magnificent and piercing poems speak directly to the heart.
—Laura Davis, author of The Courage to Heal and I Thought We’d Never Speak Again
These stunning poems by Elya Braden are both brutal and tender... elevating the spirit through the portals of redemption. Touching and evocative, sad and exhilarating, majestic and magical, these poems capture with perfect imagery and feeling the trajectory innocence takes on its way toward adulthood.
—Jack Grapes, author of Last of the Outsiders: Collected Poems
Elya Braden’s poems are daring, tender and utterly trustworthy. Each is a summons, through language irresistibly sensuous and enthralling, into a moment we, too, may have experienced but most probably ignored. ...these poems are a testimony to the healing power of telling the truth, and the artistry of each makes her healing our healing.
—Kim Rosen, author of Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words
In this vibrant first collection, Braden uses poetry as a shovel and a sifter to excavate and understand what lives in her haunted body... The result is a collection of poems both terrible and tender, in which she grapples with the primal impulses of family, sexuality, and what it means to be born a girl, to survive into womanhood, and to look back.
—Tresha Faye Haefner, Author of Take This Longing (Finishing Line Press), Founder of The Poetry Salon
