Forthcoming: Preorder now. To be published in April 2026

Poems of elliptical sorrow and delight: sharply dressed, sharply undressed.

If this is a poetics of aftermath, the lyrics within reveal that our emotions reckon with fragments, not finalities. 

9 x 6 inches. 72 pages. Cover art: Eleanor Annand.

ISBN: 978-1-7375743-9-2

Praise for Elaine Bleakney

About For Another Writing Back

Bleakney’s meditative and searching poems artfully assemble not a linear narrative, but an evocative consideration of a life. — Publisher’s Weekly

Elaine Bleakney’s For Another Writing Back skillfully undermines the reader’s expectations of prose, using the visual appearance of the text to evoke our preconceived ideas about what prose should or ought to be like. — Kristina Marie Darling in Tupelo Quarterly

About 20 Paintings by Laura Owens 

Elaine Bleakney invents a new form which marries abstraction and dailiness where poetry and art can converse. – Lee Ann Brown

Bleakney’s ekphrasis is by turn microscope, telescope, kaleidoscope, zoetrope.” — Jesse Ball

Advance Praise for Take the Exit Then Exit

Elaine Bleakney’s Take the Exit Then Exit is a book of fragments. It is a book that is resolute in the incomplete, broken, half-heard, and half-spoken, and yet it is insistently alive to the strangeness of being and especially of being in relation to other people. At the edges of these poems beckon a wholeness that’s neither desired nor welcome. For Bleakney, wholeness might be another word for the past, story, family, love, or even language, each a form that cannot reflect the complexity and turbulence it contains. Indeed, she is a poet suspicious of form’s illusory promises, and rightly so: “The worst is feeling / I must spend my life / trapped inside a tree with you.” What is so brave and surprising about Take the Exit Then Exit is that moving through these fragments we arrive at a clear-eyed vision of the self’s ferocity and a radiance that shines –“creaking singing”– like truth. — Jennifer Chang, author of An Authentic Life

The poems in Take the Exit Then Exit are notable for their distillation and brevity, their undertow of longing and loss, and their clean diction which cuts like a knife. So much happens between Bleakney’s lines, which hum with the electricity of the unsaid, and the “formal feeling” Emily Dickinson wrote about, which can come “after great pain.” Yet there is also resilience here, and wit. How can you resist a poem that begins: “Two rhododendrons/ hold each other in hell.//And bloom.”? — Amy Gerstler, author of Index of Women

What’s a synonym for raw? Oh how I wish I could express the anguish of loss like Elaine Bleakney. In Take the Exit Then Exit, she squeezes the big fat mess of family, memory and desire and extracts precise emotional daggers. Bleakney knows what it means to lose, and she knows how to communicate her loss with such buzzing clarity that it made me downright jealous. — Alec Soth

Elaine Bleakney is a poet and writer living in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Her previous books include For Another Writing Back, an avant-memoir in lyric prose (Sidebrow Books, 2014) and the chapbook 20 Paintings by Laura Owens, an ekphrastic conversation (Poor Claudia, 2013). She has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, the Little Brown Mushroom Camp for Socially Awkward Visual Storytellers, and taught writing to artists at Penland School of Craft, Warren Wilson College, the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and elsewhere. 

Reviewers, press, and libraries: to request an advance reader’s copy, please write to info@understorybooks.com

Booksellers, teachers, etc.: Readings and visits to share these poems are currently being scheduled. If you would like Elaine Bleakney to visit your bookstore, classroom, bookish situation, etc., please send word to info@understorybooks.com.