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Advance Praise for Normal Distance

“What I love about the poems in Normal Distance is how each uncannily assembles within the reader a scale model of Gabbert’s own booming wonder—a New Mexico moon rises ‘absurd on its face. // All ha ha ha.’ Sleep is where ‘Time comes out of time’; then, it’s ‘a performance for God.’ It’s all just so delight-full, delight in the Horatian sense of dulce et util, delight that pierces the reader’s mind so wisdom can get in. Gabbert achieves that highest lyric aim: she restores to living a bit of its baffle.”

—Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell

“Reading Elisa Gabbert’s Normal Distance is like seeing through ‘a mirror at strange angles,’ where contradiction and paradox fascinate and stymie the human drive to know. I loved wandering with Gabbert through extended, long-lined meditations and drilling down with her into short intense lyrics on the eternal subjects—suffering, boredom, madness, the moon—like I’d been taken in hand by a mad hatter epistemologist, wondering why we think we know what we know. You can use Normal Distance for bibliomancy, opening its pages at random to find just the right words for what ails you, and what might lift your mind and spirit too. It’s friendly and surprising, thinking with Gabbert: her wit is sly, her apprehension of the ordinary so strange and true: ‘We are born not remembering why we walked into the room.’”

—Dana Levin, author of Now Do You Know Where You Are

“‘I feel,’ says Kierkegaard’s aesthete ‘A,’ ‘as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved!’ But in this playfully despairing book, our speaker—call her the melancholy American—feels to me like she’s on third base with (a) the bases loaded and (b) the distinct feeling that the batter’s going to get walked. He does, she saunters, and, refreshingly free of ballyhoo, she scores. The poems in Normal Distance find Elisa Gabbert taking her trademark even-keeled clairvoyance and matter-of-fact sass to new extremes of quotidiana, new cul-de-sacs in the abyss. Say them and they’ll eat at you all day.”

—Graham Foust, author of Embarrassments