Elaine Bleakney is a poet and writer living in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Her book of poems, Take the Exit Then Exit, is forthcoming from Understory Books in spring 2026. Her books include For Another Writing Back (Sidebrow Books, 2014), an avant-memoir in lyric prose; the chapbook 20 Paintings by Laura Owens (Poor Claudia, 2013), an ekphrastic conversation; and the tear-apart anthology Poem in Your Pocket (Abrams, 2009), which she edited.
Nonfiction
Fall 2025
My Terminator
At the end of my first semester of counseling school, my professor asked us to think about termination. She meant: the end of our time together in class and our […]
Nonfiction
May/June 2015
Alive Together
I live in an old oak grove. The long, entangled branches shift above the houses. One avenue is a bent, fissured canopy—I walk under two or three times a day. […]
Summer 2012
Reading Ravicka: Two Novels in a Trilogy by Renee Gladman
Ah, Ravicka. Where the bookstores are all independent, language swoops through the body, and buildings disintegrate. A city-state in flux and crisis. Belgians know about it. Citizens are disappearing. There’s still good coffee, though it’s the end of the world.
Fall 2009
Glass
I was fixed in him; glass would not stream from itself. I took the window down; the woods now other woods surrounding. I took myself to a class on Berry […]