Lush with painterly attention to color and form—including Vincent van Gogh's wheat field paintings—and a poet's attention to the rabbit trails and echoes of language, E.G. Cunningham's Field Notes explores the relationship of the field to questions of history, identity, and memory. Verdant with observations of place, the writer's personal and U.S. history (for example, the name "Strawberry Fields" linguistically links a secret compound near Guantanamo for "ghost detainees," as well as the title of a film about visiting a former Japanese internment camp, and the Beatles' hit song), the interplay of text and photographs moves like a shifting light across an open expanse of ground. How lucky to be invited to the field by E.G. Cunningham, to not look away from either our loves or harm.

E. G. Cunningham was born in South Carolina and grew up in Italy and Florida. Her poems, essays, stories, and hybrid pieces have appeared in or are forthcoming from a wide range of national and international publications, including The Abandoned Playground, Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Nation, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, Southern Humanities Review, and ZYZZYVA. Her most recent chapbook, Oranges for Venus, was selected as the 2023 1br/3bath Editor's Choice from Tilted House Press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. Read more about her writing and music at egcunningham.com.

"Beautifully and interestingly written and thought-through, this collection of small, rectangular poems, like windows, weaves complexity into scraps of any field one might take into one's vision. A sort of desperation, an expanse, latent histories, memories, loves, harms: the field here is the space-in-which all these tensions coalesce, find various purchase, relations. Van Gogh, who killed himself in a wheatfield, CIA operations in America's 'strawberry fields,' the watched history of a family along suburbia's hems . . . 'a blue child of harm,' Cunningham writes, 'I fielded the destruction between them.' All is eerily troubled here: even the eye itself troubles the field 'of seclusion, isolation, estrangement, anomie.' Boys play war games in the field, graves appear, history goes on sown with seeds of threat. There is no absolution here, & if there is grace it is as sharp as a knife's edge." — Cody-Rose Clevidence

"A treasure chest of literal and literary snapshots, Elizabeth G. Cunningham's Field Notes take(s) us, each one of us 'history's child,' along its polyvocal and polyvalent meanderings through fields of public and personal histories. Here, fields of childhood open onto the desire to flee from the figure of suburbia which longs also, from its shared post-pastoral condition, to return to some idealized childhood. Here a field is a field and is never only a field. Because it is haunted: the field of the page haunted by James Baldwin; the field of vision haunted by Vincent Van Gogh; Strawberry Fields haunted as much by international pop songs as by the spectre of Guantanamo and its neighbouring 'ghost detainees.' Through her delicate curation of inter-refractive meditations, Elizabeth brilliantly deploys ekphrasis to deconstruct the very act of looking. This book performs looking as a polysemous act: as the fantasy of objectivity,as seeking, as inherently political apprehension.[...] This beautiful epistemology of longing reminds us that looking is witnessing. I am grateful for this seditious weaponization of poetic utterance as ethos, as making, and as the urgent question of re-making." — Erina Harris

"In Field Notes, Elizabeth Cunningham writes in microdoses that throw space open like sound amplified by a pinhole. Williams and Olson, among others, imagined poetry as fields of openness in the same way one might imagine a page with no print is blank, is silence: 'there's no hunting in suburbia.' Don't believe it. By some invisible folding of form into technique, Field Notes robs modern astonishment of this naiveté, this innocence, as if urging it, and so us, to grow up. 'Cause that page was never blank, that silence isn't quiet in the least—suburbia is a killing field. So Cunningham reimagines the field's openness as something the hunted dare not traverse, as something full of incipient destruction: a dry field isn't absent moisture; it's already ablaze. The photos that accompany the lyrical windows through which we gaze over Cunningham's remindfields kept reminding me of Rothko, who, like van Gogh, whom we meet in Field Notes, also bled out into his subject, an image of which there are no limited edition prints for sale. 'Childhood is a field in which we learn to construct fences,' Cunningham writes. Field Notes implies that writing—like growing up—means we mark where a few of those fences stood before they got blown away; then life is that thing we do in the crosshairs." — Ed Pavlić