Permeable Divide

Ellen Rachlin’s new book is intriguing, ingenious, and deftly wrought, a delight to the mind and the spirit. About it, Elise Paschen has said, “In her stunning new book, Ellen Rachlin explores, as if from a philosopher’s point of view, the world around her. Reality, at times, is observed from a distance—a traveler contemplates the landscape and reckons, ‘The natural world is never enough.’ These are gems of poems which seek clarity while catching flashes of light.” Molly Peacock adds, “In her splendid fourth collection, poet Ellen Rachlin explores what she calls the ‘Permeable Divide’—the breach between the living and a loved one lost to death, the gap between confidence and hesitation, the gulf between banking and art, and perhaps most devastatingly, the chasm between freedom and habit. Rachlin combines her deliciously unique talents and background to speak about the differences between money and value. She crafts aphoristic and well-aimed poems that explode when we least expect them to—into a tender understanding of the rifts in our world. I don’t often read a book of poems straight through, but I did that with Permeable Divide. I was catapulted from line to line, moved and inspired. And this from Emily Fragos: “ ‘There is no fooling grief,’ Ellen Rachlin wisely writes, in her elegant, clear-eyed book, Permeable Divide. These are incorruptible poems of life’s inevitable losses that always harbor emotional barter. Bad weather is useless as sorrow, the poet insists; but sorrow, without self-pity, is what Rachlin recognizes— honestly, calmly, and compassionately — as part and parcel of our sentient human design. Variety is the spice of Rachlin’s poetry, as Kate Gale notes when she writes, “Math, science and the crunching of numbers show up in Ellen Rachlin’s book next to stars, supernovae, meteor showers and memory, a desire for order. She collapses the time between memory and implosion.”