“For poet, musician, and visual artist Elizabeth Devlin, motherhood is a stark continuum: at one end lies the dissolution of the self, while delicious embodiment occupies the other. From Far Rockaway to family court, Devlin dramatizes the marvels and societal letdowns of motherhood, as well as the sureness that the end of a marriage does not equate the end of love. Centering survival and the resilience of womanhood Milk Spine makes for an urgent, lyrical debut.”
-Sarah M. Sala, author of Devil’s Lake
“Devlin is everywhere all at once, and takes you there. This is writing with a heartbeat—sensorial, experiential—from a person who sees how she is seen, drifting among the city’s myriad catcalls and pratfalls, taking note. Self-aware and wry, these poems regale with tales of birthing and being (and witching), investigating a world full of desire, transient but savored, relishing in sex and the incantatory libido of language, amid a cityscape pressed into the senses like an IUD “buried deep inside my whom.” This is an open love letter to life, reader, biting and curious, and startlingly good.”
-Joe Pan, author of Operating Systems
“Devlin's verse reminds the reader that the things we love most can pierce soft abdomen with their mouths. And that joy (disruptive & fleeting) is both an action verb & a form of resistance.”
-Rangi McNeil, author of Occasional Poems and The Missing
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ELIZABETH DEVLIN is an avant-garde-folk singer/songwriter, autoharpist, visual artist, poet, and curator of numerous art, music, and literary events, including the series: PoeTrap, Prose By Any Other, Token Folk Acoustic and The Highwaymen. Devlin’s art and poetry have appeared in ep;phany, Cobramilk, The Opiate, Bomb, We the Tender Hearted and elsewhere. As the Founding Director of Bessie’s, a private artist studio and salon, Devlin hosted art, community, literary and acoustic music events in Brooklyn. Devlin has toured nationally and internationally for a decade and a half, and has released five albums: Conscientious Objector (What A Mess! Records, 2022), Orchid Mantis (2017), For Whom the Angels Named (2011), Ladybug EP (2011), All Are Relative (2009). Forthcoming, Devlin will release the full-length album, My Father's Country.