ABOUT THE BOOK

2018 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series Selection

In the Shadow Country, Elena Cisneros’ debut full-length poetry collection, is a book that takes place after-hours, its stories and concerns grounded in the unlit places of Middle America. Through lamplight, moonlight, blood sunrises, and fireflies, Cisneros’ lyrics illuminate the vast prairies of South Dakota and the corners of our country’s difficult histories. This extraordinary book, populated by revenants and ghosts, is an emotional ballot that asks us to choose between remembrance and forgetting.

“Directions to a Grieving Ghost’ might be the title of not just one but many of the poems in Elena Cisneros’ powerful first book, In the Shadow Country. Her poems prohibit paraphrase; each is mysterious, bold, and haunted by traces of actual and spiritual forebears. In the midst of mourning and harrowing loneliness, the poems, like flashes of lightning on a dark road suddenly startle with their beauty.”

— Lee Upton

ABOUT ELENA CISNEROS

Elena Cisneros is a poet living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. She received her BA and MFA from Hamline University. She is the author of The Sad True Tales of J. Strait: In Which There Is Contemplation (2012), as well as Dark Stars with artist Susan Solomon (2014). Her poetry has appeared in the St. Paul Almanac, Sleet Magazine, Red Bird Broadsides, and the Minnesota Book Arts Winter book Lessons for Our Time (2012). She also was a finalist for the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry and Creative Prose in the 2016-2017 year.

104 pages | 5.5 x 7.5 in.
ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-87-1 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-88-8 (hardcover)