Beating the Bounds

Liz Ahl is the author of the poetry collections Home Economics (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016), Talking About the Weather (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012), Luck (Pecan Grove Press, 2010), and A Thirst That's Partly Mine (winner of the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest). Luck received the Reader's Choice in Poetry award at the 2011 New Hampshire Literary Awards. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Prairie Schooner, Atlanta Review, Able Muse, Measure, Crab Orchard Review, River Styx, North American Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Tidal Basin Review, among others. Her work has also been included in several anthologies, including This Assignment is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013), Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies (Red Hen Press, 2004), and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University of Akron Press, 2012). She has been awarded residencies at Playa, Jentel, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

"The title poem of Liz Ahl’s brilliant collection, Beating the Bounds, investigates the ritual walking of the boundaries of a town every seven years. Ahl explores psychological and literal geographies, what it means to inhabit a space, and the beauties and mysteries she discovers there. . . . These dazzling poems draw us in to the vibrant spaces they mark and make." —Ann Hudson

 

"I have been eagerly awaiting a full-length book of poems from this remarkable poet and Liz Ahl has delivered a stunner! In her beautifully realized collection, Ahl sets out 'to trace the contours / of the terrestrial constellations—the sets of lines / we name parish, town, body: all synonyms for home.' . . . And we are walking that path with her, marveling at the discernment and generosity of these poems, delighting in how they make the strange familiar and the familiar strange." —Karen McPherson

 

"Witty, unsparing, Liz Ahl weds a keen understanding of rhetoric with a lush savoring of language’s pleasures. I hunger for more." —Robin Becker

 

"Growing up as a 'Navy Brat,' Liz Ahl long identified as the 'Woman from Away,' but in Beating the Bounds she embarks on the adventure of staying put in smalltown New England." —Grace Bauer

 

Review by Matthew Cheney

Coming soon!

100 pp, Paperback

ISBN 978-1-939449-14-6

Price $18.00

Publication Date: September, 2017