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To Speak
by Michelle Elrick
Special to the TWS Website: To Speak (Read an Excerpt, PDF format)
In the title poem of her debut collection of poetry, To Speak, Michelle Elrick writes:
My silence seems inevitable/as if I cannot afford to give anything away./As if I have given it all already, given it to you.
When failure of a love affair renders everything irrevocably strange, unutterable, the poet begins a quest in search of the means to be able to “speak” again. This is the journey the reader is invited to become a part of, traveling by poem on a road trip that will take them both through miles of familiar and uncharted terrain.
Seduced by the quiet yet forceful voice of the speaker, readers will find themselves entranced by all the ways in which words, like wings, unfold into flight. The beauty and strength of Michelle Elrick’s poetry is that it resonates with simplicity and moth-like grace even when it is asking for the world. So when she asks, Are you a kiln? Are you a can of Krylon? It does seem entirely possible.
Michelle Elrick is a poet and fiction writer from British Columbia and Manitoba. Growing up on a mountain overlooking the Fraser Valley contributed to a sense of perspective that has continued to develop in her writing. Now on Canada’s great plain, she lives in an attic overlooking the rooftops of Winnipeg. Her first book, a collection of poems titled To Speak, was published by The Muses’ Company in 2010. In addition, her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Canadian Literature, Event and other magazines, and performed at festivals and events in Vancouver, Winnipeg, London, Kingston and Belfast. She is currently deep in a second draft of her novel, Dust House, surfacing on occasion to play the banjo and walk the dog.
More about Michelle can be found on her website, www.michelleelrick.ca
