Every Little Vanishing

By Sheleen McElhinney

Winner of 2021 Write Bloody Publishing Book Award.

A perfect book for readers searching for the salve of darker verse and recovery poetry.
Every Little Vanishing is, at its core, a collection of poetry that will bring you to your knees with its honesty.

"...our marriage / a bridge between staying for the children we had or leaving for the people we want to become."

"Every Little Vanishing” might change your definition of poetry forever. If you've ever thought of the poem as something that muses and meanders, think again. Sheleen McElhinney writes poems the way novelists write page-turning fiction. Her first lines grab you by the collar and pull you––no––drag you through each word, kicking and screaming until you reach the poem's end. By the last line, you hurt so good you beg Sheleen to do it again. There were times I wanted to rip out the pages of this book and swallow them, desperate to consume the work in as many ways possible. There were times I pressed my ear to this book and heard an ocean of grief. What I mean is, this book will both drown and buoy you."

--Megan Falley, Author of Drive Here and Devastate Me, Write Bloody 2018
Co-Author of How Poetry Can Change Your Heart, Chronicle Books, 2019

“Like submarines, Sheleen McElhinney's unflinching poems probe the lightless regions of memory, addiction, loss, longing, and daughter-/sister-/mother-hood. In her debut collection she illuminates the various ruthlessnesses of a ruthless personal history—an illumination powerful enough to reveal a hard won hope, even here among the grief and disappointments of living. This is a poetics of survival that, using as its instruments, a fierce attention to detail and a brazen, uncompromising candor. It wades resolutely through the terrors of inhabiting a body in time and arrives at the one true miracle: the next moment. And the next. And the next.”

--Jeremy Radin, Author of Slow Dance With Sasquatch and Dear Sal.


ABOUT THE BOOK:

These poems drag you to the darkroom of vulnerability where everything is exposed; the wounded child, the wreckless adolescent, the life and death of a sibling to addiction, and the loss of self through marriage and motherhood. These poems hold beneath their hard exterior the soft underbelly of what it means to love and lose. They are for anyone who wants to learn how to grow a new skin, to excavate the body of its grief, to devour it, and to let it choke you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949342468

Sheleen McElhinney

Sheleen McElhinney is an unschooled poet, the runt of a large litter of kids, who grew up writing poetry in her diary, her left palm, the inside of her skull, and cocktail napkins. It wasn't until the 2020 pandemic, when slowing down and staying inside was mandatory, that she decided to knuckle down with the trauma and grief that would become this book. She currently lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pa with her 3 miraculous children. Her work has appeared in Whiskey Island Magazine and Dogzplot flash fiction.

Book preview

TO A BROTHER

Sure, you were messy. Drank from the measuring glass,

ate off the cutting board, littered the bathroom floor

with powdered dime bags, singed spoons—

wept on the carpet, puked on the carpet, went on

and on about how you’d get better, never got better.

Sure, I lost sleep. All those nights you stayed out—

and I’d ask some imperceptible god above

my bedroom ceiling to carry my sharp

whisper to your ear, wherever you were—

under a bridge, a bathroom stall, a sunken

soiled cushion, clouded utopia—to wake up,

remember me. Come home.

I am selfish. I would take you in your suffering

over this grief that has replaced you.

It is a gnarly pit in the center of a whole tender life,

wasted. It is the ghost of you, throwing stones

at my bedroom window to let you in after dark.

Wants only to talk about the good times, us as children,

my brother, painting the nails

on my right hand, first boy to call me pretty.

It wants to play all your favorite songs on loop

so I can watch you dance forever down the long hall

of my memory. Watch you roller skate

backwards on the Palace rink.

Just when I think it’s gone, it shows up

in the features of the nephew you never met. Eyes

the same forget-me-not blue. It is the crack

in the foundation of my house. Gets wider,

opens like a chasm, calls to me—

the lonely echo, where

everything I’ve lost has gone.

Hell of a damn grave. Wish it were mine.

—The Royal Tenenbaums

ANOTHER NIGHT WOUNDED

He’s dead. My God,

wake up, your brother is dead.

My mother hovers

over me, drooling tears, drooling

snot, heart like a flickering match.

The car outside of the house

is on fire. We run to the window,

press our hands to the glass, watch

the crackle and pop of burning

steel. Flames lick the sky

into wounds. My mother moans

like a tree in a storm. The cops come,

the firemen, the neighboring house

lights flick on. The neighbors whisper,

he’s really done it this time. Dogs bark

on their chains, a growling to open

the charcoaled earth to let my brother

fall in. The car is empty. A singed shell,

a glowing coal. My skin turns

to ash, my lungs expand to bursting.

My feet pound the stairs

to his room, kick the door wide,

and there he is, this miracle

I prayed for, let him