Rattle

Foreword by Julie Agoos

Bruce’s language is deceptively straightforward, words resonate with echoes of revival meetings and oral storytelling traditions. She hones in on the perfect image, the apt metaphor. The “rattle” of the title becomes at once the rattle of memory and the rattle of death, but also the rattle that animates nature and syncopates the music of our lives as we move through it.

Eloise Bruce’s book Rattle was published by CavanKerry in 2004. She is member of the critique and performance group Cool Women.  In 2018 she received the New Jersey Governor’s Award for Arts Education. She has had various roles at the Frost Place Center for Poetry and the Arts.  Since its inception she has been integral in nurturing and guiding Poetry Out Loud in New Jersey and she is youth editor for RavensPerch Magazine. A chapbook Scud Cloud, a conversation in poetry with her husband David Keller about living with his dementia is due out in 2020 from Ragged Sky.

Henry is long is every way-
tooth, his hair, penis, and silences.
He is eating buttermilk and cornbread
or oyster stew. He wants a divorce.

From “Scrapbook 1973”

“What a simmering, rich and alive book Rattle is. Full of the spirit of place and kin, Southern food, Southern violence, loyalty and love, guilt and laughter. Haunted by thedead, transplanted North riddled with myth, these poems emanate the wisdom of survival. They are a big pleasure to read.”
— Alicia Ostriker

April 2004
76 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.5
$14
978-0-9707186-8-6