Still Life with Timex: Poems
Elisabeth Murawski
2020 Winner of the Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize
Still Life with Timex chronicles a mother’s loss. These poems explore the unsightly aspects of grief and the survivor’s guilt of outliving a child. In the hospital with her son, the speaker directs her bitterness toward institutions and faith that do not do enough. Within this collection there are discoveries of life in its decay and remembrance. Blame indicts everyone—most especially the speaker herself, as she struggles to cope with shame as enduring as loss.
“This book explores the lunar terrain of a mother’s grief following her son’s estrangement and death in poems that evoke Greek tragedy and Christian martyrdom to place her personal story within a larger context of history and art. What distinguishes the writing is quality and restraint—spare, sculpted, and clear, with each word chosen and placed to maximum effect. The poems are by turns haunting and harrowing, but always darkly beautiful. In them we join a mother on a journey of suffering that emerges finally, not into sunshine redemption, but into a life it is possible to continue living.”
—Rebecca Foust, author of Paradise Drive and Only
Elisabeth Murawski received the 2010 May Swenson Poetry Award for her collection Zorba’s Daughter, published by the Utah State University Press. She is the author of Heiress, Moon and Mercury, and two chapbooks, Troubled by an Angel and Out-patients. Her poetry has appeared in The Yale Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, FIELD among others. A native of Chicago, she currently lives in Alexandria, VA.
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