You Can Call It Beautiful

"In You Can Call It Beautiful by Debra Elisa, readers encounter a unique style as idiosyncratic as Emily Dickinson's with poems flaunting 'breath and tiptoe glory and Clover.' Elisa celebrates a world of simple pleasures, kind acts, and fertile moments, moments when 'deadheads/take their own sweet time to fall and reseed the garden.' In this hefty array of resonant poems examining nature, travel, technology, pop culture, or social justice, the result is the same: quiet experiences lead to wisdom."
-Allen Braden, author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood

"Debra Elisa moves joyfully, with gratitude, respect, and generosity in the vast world she creates in You Can Call It Beautiful. She welcomes us into 'the circle of friends 'who gather/in praise of poetry.' In this collection, Elisa travels mindfully through the natural world where she lives, and where she sojourns, to bear witness to 'the 'young/roaming streets of blood,' and to the creatures whose names we praise with her-'Yellow-Billed Cuckoo,' 'Malone Jumping Slug.'"
-Willa Schneberg, Oregon Book Award recipient; author of The Naked Room