Read it as a flip book above, or download the PDF.
From a new review by Lynn Melnick at Luna Luna Magazine:
Conversation with the Stone Wife, a chapbook of poems by Natalie Eilbert, delivers to us a Venus who is as complex and contradictory as any flesh-and-blood human. Here Venus gets to talk back, and what she has to say is both long-awaited and timeless. “…what I own is the damage,” the speaker chillingly states “of your theorized life.”
This complex illustration of female-hood is one of the reasons this chapbook is so thrilling; it offers no easy explanations, or explorations. Eilbert is a remarkably deft poet. Her skill with form, along with the music of her words, lends a beauty to the book that scrapes against the sometimes difficult or raw language."
[Read the rest]
From a new review by Lynn Melnick at Luna Luna Magazine:
Conversation with the Stone Wife, a chapbook of poems by Natalie Eilbert, delivers to us a Venus who is as complex and contradictory as any flesh-and-blood human. Here Venus gets to talk back, and what she has to say is both long-awaited and timeless. “…what I own is the damage,” the speaker chillingly states “of your theorized life.”
This complex illustration of female-hood is one of the reasons this chapbook is so thrilling; it offers no easy explanations, or explorations. Eilbert is a remarkably deft poet. Her skill with form, along with the music of her words, lends a beauty to the book that scrapes against the sometimes difficult or raw language."
[Read the rest]
PRAISE FOR CONVERSATION WITH THE STONE WIFE
Among the post-apocalyptic rubble, you can still hear the quivering orgasm of human inquisition in Natalie Eilbert’s first book, Conversations With the Stone Wife, to be released by Bloof Books this year. Eilbert unburies the Venus of Willendorf, a figure whom civilization’s increasingly greedy demands have been pinned on- in one form or another-for centuries, and dares to ask her about wifery, motherhood, muse-life, and fertility. Quite understandably, the Venus has other things on her mind, which Eilbert voices horrifically, sensually, and with a historian’s antecedent yet prophetic look over the shoulder. The world this chapbook creates is one posterior enough to systemic collapse to admit that it’s ruined itself. Still, somehow, the people expect an oracle with a velvet voice. Instead, they get the vengefully coarse whisper of the primeval returned to say, “I told you so.” Still, the stone wife is not all doom and gloom. She’s going to have her way with you through Eilbert’s lush verbs and forceful repetition, and you’re going to love it.
—Monica McClure, Electric Literature
[Natalie Eilbert] hints at her way of reckoning, carrying the machine, hoisting the flag, creating this new etymology (and further, the new country), with pained story and images of the so cruel is so beautiful variety. [She] rocks the poetic boat right with her snapping of plastic forks, daring you to dig into this muck with her, so dangerously enchanting.
—Vouched Books
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