Elinor Nauen

new & selected poetry & prose. Available from Small Press Distribution or, y'know, Amazon.

My long poem in 5 sections: Po' World, Derek & the Boys, Pink Highways, Almost Chosen, and Ezra & Johnny

The title says it all, I think. It's my adventures in wedded bliss. Published by Cinco Puntos Press out of El Paso. Wonderfully illustrated by Sophy Naess.

Move over, Roger Angell, and make room at the top for another superb literary collection of baseball writing--poems, essays, and fiction by women writers. As editor Nauen points out, women enjoy the game differently than men: they don't have to feel like failures for not playing, and they are free to enjoy the entire spectacle before them. In three sections ("Coming to the PIate," "Why We Love It," and "Analysis of Baseball"), more than 70 writers share their thoughts and feelings about this most American of sports. From Shirley Jackson on Little League and Annie Dillard on pitching to Bernadette Mayer on Carlton Fisk's legs, this anthology is the next best thing to the real diamond. Poet Marianne Moore says it perfectly: "Writing is exciting / and baseball is like writing." Eloise Kinney in Booklist

From Publisher's Weekly:
Nauen, who has written a collection of poems titled Cars and Other Poems and collected an anthology on women and baseball, has done a good job of pulling together another treasury of poetry, short fiction and essays on cars and the places they take us. There's an eerily evocative poem about a first speeding ticket by Debra Bruce, and an often hilarious account of learning to drive by Oona Short, who struggled to memorize gems from the learner's manual along the lines of "A straight black line means this. A squiggly black line means that." Nauen has included a variety of accounts of cross-country journeys by travelers ranging from Eudora Welty (whose mother kept track of mileage with an AAA Blue Book and a travel log) to the pot-smoking, hard-drinking narrator of Jayne Anne Phillips's "Fast Lanes." She has selected some fine work, including poems by Louise McNeill, Lynn Emanuel and Pansy Maurer-Alvarez and essays by journalist Jill Amadio and writer/editor Leslea Newman. She has also chosen broadly, with one particularly memorable essay coming from Emily Post. Post, who drove from New York to California in 1915, offers advice to travelers that is still useful: "Wear the thinnest and least amount of underwear that you can feel decently clad in, so as to get as many fresh changes as possible in the least space, because of the difficulty in stopping often to have things laundered." How true.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Nauen's poems are like her personality, which is irresistible"--Richard Hell
"Streetwise and New York funny. Nauen has created a windswept metaphysic of American Life..."--Andrei Codrescu

"dreams aimless as destinations"