Love as Invasive Species

“Ellen Kombiyil writes out of the unsettling complexity of how we see ourselves and others changing from generation to generation. From grandmother to mother to poet daughter, Kombiyil voices the shifting manners and morals of working class women as they struggle to come to terms with their own sexuality, child-rearing, domestic life, the world of work, aging, illness, physical debility, and death. Everything is put to the test in these poems, particularly the poet’s own ethical understandings as refracted through her memories of childhood and adolescence. But her ambition doesn’t stop there: she’s like Keats in her desire to live in a world of unmediated experience, in which verbally realized sensations deliver reality whole.”

—Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch, winner of the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize