Approaching reading and writing as forms of divination, Scries navigates the dark territory of oracular poetics, bringing second sight to a strange range of interlocutors

-the extrasurrealist poetry of Joyce Mansour's Cris, a hungry ghost, the plant damiana, Tarovsky's Turin Horse, and Pandora. The last poem channels Margery Kempe, and Alice in Wonderland.

Praise for Workman's previous collections:

"Absolutely feminine, disobedient, radiant, scathing."

—Sarah Fox, on ENDLESSNESS IS NO DESOLATION

"How to begin without comparing this book to the books that keep getting called 'home.'"

—Carrie Lorig, on ENDLESSNESS IS NO DESOLATION

"END is an achievement in play. It is true joy. It is perfect gemini anxiety/flexibility and human strength, sitting with and passing through difficult fury and ugly love."

—Feng Sun Chen, on ENDLESSNESS IS NO DESOLATION

"This is a most ungrim grimoire. This is where to sit at a disaster."

—Sharon Mesmer, on ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND

"Surprisingly universal and welcoming."

—Jennifer L. Knox, on ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND

"Workman's artistic antennas are tuned to the civic mindfuck that characterizes our age. While we're both paralyzed and tantalized by the entanglement of fantasy and reality scripting our daily life, Workman's poetry seems at once to reflect the ethos of this world, while simultaneously rejecting it by making it entirely her own."

—John Ebersole, on ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND

"One can hear Breton's cry at the end of Nadja, 'Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all.' Workman's work argues definitively for the imagination, for frolic, for the 'make' in 'make sense.'"

—James Wagner, on ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND

Elisabeth Workman is a writer and poet with a background in dance. She's the author of a dozen chapbooks—including The Figures: A Litter (Dancing Girl Press)—and the full-length poetry collections ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND (Bloof Books), Endlessness Is No Desolation (Dusie Press), and Scries (Beauty School Editions). She collaborates with visual artists, musicians, dancers, other poets (dead and alive), and plants. Her work has appeared in The End of the World Project (Moria Books), Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing in the Anthropocene (Wesleyan), and Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf (Edge Books). Numerous institutions have made time/space ($) for these explorations possible (including Jerome, McKnight, MCAD, MSAB, the University of Minnesota, the PA Council on the Arts, and In Cahoots) and in turn have informed her teaching that finds in poetry a vessel/crucible for transformation and radical embodiment. She can be found in the disembodied realm at elisabethworkman.com.

"Scries moves left-handed into the dark, where the body becomes a divinatory surface: fugitive, unruly, alive with death, exceeding every category meant to contain it. These poems scry—text through text, body through body—each charged surface opening into another, transmitting what cannot be possessed, purified, or resolved. Here, language is an act of divination, a feminist practice of knowing otherwise: a refusal of coherence's tyranny, instead offering an attunement to the brilliant authority of excess, aberration, and the gorgeous and difficult mess of being. Elisabeth Workman responds to the mystery in an idiom of mystery. Scries is a fierce, eerie, tender, gutsy, and exceedingly wise book." — Selah Saterstrom, author of Slab and Ideal Suggestions

"What if a book jail-broke the whole damn English language with abandon? What if it were hyper-lyric, cosmic horror gender burlesque, finished with searching and historically conscious flash essays? What if reading was an augury of the glittering star-slime of eviscerated superstructures? Scries has serious vision. Workman is at the vertiginous heights of her creative and intellectual powers." — Joe Hall, author of Buffalo Free Rapid Transit

"An expelleretrix of adjectives masquerading as verbs moonlighting as imperatives—Elisabeth Workman lassos the English language as fast as she reinvents it. No handrails here, reader… Bring your critical apparatus, your divining equipment, your weird machinery, your own sad nervous system. With her smart sonic wordplay, we are past and present all at once as she scries her fanatical entrail glyphs, quims her social dusts, and utters her galactic manic gusts." — Susana Gardner, author of Herso, an heirship in waves