Elizabeth Kincaid-Ehlers’ third full-length book, How Do I Hate Thee? is a splendid collection of verse transforming well-known poems-of-the-past into versions that are at once raucous and heart-breaking. They will make you laugh and cry at the same time. Be prepared for the unexpected! The book has been greeted enthusiastically by all who have seen it. John Wadhams, Executive Director of Wood Memorial Library, says this: “Reading Elizabeth Kincaid-Ehlers’ recent volume How Do I Hate Thee? I knew how Keats felt when he stayed up all night reading Chapman’s vigorous and earthy translation of Homer. For her part, Kincaid-Ehlers has transformed poems we all know well into astonishingly down-to-earth verse she imagines poets before her might have written if visited by Big Lymphoma — verse expressing her fury at the cancer that has attacked her. It would be too easy to call this book a collection of angry poems. The author finds comfort and inspiration in the art of the past, and finds solace in her rage, which has produced work as whimsical and restorative as ‘Cancer, Get Over It,’ in which she taunts: ‘You’re only one of Death’s accoutrements...a paltry piffle...Death will beat you C, you pitiful creep.’ Everyone should read these poems. They are Elizabeth’s best work.” And this praise from Humphrey Tonkin, President Emeritus of the University of Hartford and Professor of the Humanities: “When Elizabeth Kincaid-Ehlers was stricken with cancer, she conjured up a lifetime of reading and writing poetry to fight it. The result is this collection of new poems which, by turns ironic and defiant, take old words and old ways and put them to new uses, ultimately turning anger to affirmation, always in the shadowy and inspiring presence of poets from the past. These are remarkable poems.”
Elizabeth Kincaid-Ehlers moved to Connecticut in 1979 to be Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Trinity College for one year. She came to like living in Connecticut so much during an extension of her contract that when it ended, she went back to school and retrained as a psychotherapist in order to stay in the state. During her years of additional studies, she taught at the Hartford branch of the University of Connecticut and participated in the state’s Writers-in-the-Schools Program. Elizabeth was born in Michigan and, after spending part of her growing-up years in Georgia, she went back north to earn her B.A. at the University of Michigan in 1955. Throughout the following years, because of her husband’s peregrinations, Elizabeth began many M.A. programs, only to have to abandon credits and move on. At last the family, which by then included two sons, stayed still long enough for her to earn an M.A. at the University of Illinois. After a move to Rochester, New York, and the birth of two more sons, the marriage ended. Elizabeth then went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in 1978. During all those years she continued to teach and write. Since the mid-1980s, Elizabeth has maintained a private practice as a psychotherapist, all the while writing, giving poetry readings, and occasionally teaching. Her oldest son and family remain in upstate New York, while the three other sons and their wives live in the Hartford area, along with her five, and counting, younger grand-children. For them she is constantly grateful. Furthermore, for love of them, she intends to stay put. Click here to read samples from the book. Click here to view upcoming events. Click here to read additional material relevant to the book. |
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BOOK STATISTICS ISBN 978-1-936482-08-5
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