Yellow Rose Effigy, by cm ellis

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In Yellow Rose Effigy, cm ellis’ debut chapbook, grief waltzes to the same song as seduction, sticking to the speaker’s heels. Until it picks them up and swings them dizzy. Until they flint, setting fire to all the speaker’s certainties as easily as dry flowers.

In this collection sorrow does not let the speaker go to breathe for a moment. The dance is disorienting and infuriating in turn. Is the speaker smiling or grimacing? Singing or crying?

Yellow Rose Effigy is a release and an offering of what was made in the dark and burned for light.

"... is a quilted bravado of poems that come together like 'tendrils wrapping' & 'barbed ends snagging' your emotions. this book kept me captivated, each poem unfurling a different perspective of image and visual aspect. 

—John Compton

"The poems in cm ellis's Yellow Rose Effigy are 'visions // of what shadows keep.' ellis’s lines remind us that to cast a shadow (like a spell) requires distance 'twixt light source, silhouetted object, & shadow-screen, a distance that is constantly collapsing and being renegotiated by the speakers of Yellow Rose Effigy's gorgeous, honeyed lyrics. ellis's uncanny sense of image (fists are black walnuts in one poem, and in another 'pearls […] lantern the night') has the textural variety of muskmelon and the particular freshness of honeydew. It takes a poet, in the most classical sense, to come up from the darkness and bring forth a song; let us be grateful that cm ellis has done this here in this beautiful book, coaxing from the deep earth of grief 'a song of things too dark / & soft to hold.'"

—Tom Snarsky

cm ellis (Michael C.) is the fiction editor for Ghost City Review and lives in Texas. Their affair with writing has been wildly inappropriate and deeply embarrassing for all involved. They also really like pistachios. If you’re lookin you can find them on the Poems & Whiskey Podcast (it’s in all the places, pretty sure) where they just. keep. talking.