Reassurance in Negative Space - Poems

Elizabyth Hiscox’s new collection, Reassurance in Negative Space, is haunting in the way that brilliance of mind and vision encounter an almost secret vocabulary. This is the revealing intercession of one road upon another in the outskirts of Rome a hundred years past. It is also the infrared optics of ideas of negative space peering into previously unobserved, undisturbed dark matter. A few of the poems surprise utterly, have almost a pre-creation memory for us of things that startle and seem true. She is a terrific and sometimes very funny poet of the first order.
— Norman Dubie, author of The Quotations of Bone

“All angels pant as surely as they part”—Elizabyth Hiscox’s Reassurance in Negative Space studies the relationship between negative capability and communion. Between art and comfort. No rote reassurance is sought after or offered in these pages—the chocolate bunnies (better than Lent) are delicious but hollow. And after cataloguing and deeply considering the negative spaces of art—from the tiny details of a series of Japanese netsuke sculptures, to Archeology Today articles, to pieces of literature, music, architecture, painting—Hiscox breaks a tender heart with this equivocal and necessary advice for her reader: “Fall already, beautiful.” In this gorgeous and spiritually rugged ekphrastic book I do pant, I do part, and I do fall.
— Sarah Vap, author of Viability