Ellen Hagan

CROWNED

is coming

“Like a port town, Ellen Hagan's Crowned is a landscape of intersections. & this landscape houses comings & goings, loss & desire, the infinite pleasures & breakings of the body. Every thing touches every thing as she moves us, deftly, from asphalt to bluegrass, from Facebook to Katrina, from bourbon to Latin church prayers found on the inside of her mother's shoe-box before surgery. She disallows us the comfort or disillusion of distance but, instead, works for a brave reckoning with the past & present. To me, these poems cousin the poems of both Audre Lorde & Kim Addonizio: sometimes they leave you splintered, sometimes they leave you saved. It's as if Hagan has lowered her stethoscope down into the matter of things & asked it to speak. These poems are what the stethoscope said.”

-Aracelis Girmay, poet

“Crowned is a poetic collage from a life that has been ripped and torn in places and then put back together to create the portrait of a whole woman. Ellen’s poetry tells complex tragedies and makes ordinary moments profound. And though these verses are Ellen’s personal accounts, between the lines you see yourself, your family, and your neighbors. Ellen’s retelling of her own pains and triumphs undoubtedly inspires you to reflect on your own. This collection of poems is a celebration of the human plight, a letter to the child in all of us, a summons to stand up and fight against injustice, and an invitation for all to rise to a royal state of being.”

-Renée Watson, author

“The poems of Crowned come from woman soaked Kentucky earth, the humid sweetness of New Orleans and the deep soul kisses of New York. Ellen Hagan’s words trace the route of self with a tongue untied. These are a woman’s poems, these are a bruja’s stories, these are the incantations of a Roma woman. These poems are our maps home.”

-Kelly Norman Ellis, poet

praise for CROWNED