Encyclopaedia

Winner of the 2022 New Poets Prize.

Chloe Elliot’s Encyclopaedia is playful and visceral, exploring boundaries of identity and the search for meaning in poems that delight with richly tactile language. Formally varied, these poems are unflinching in their physicality.

A well balanced mix of pastiche and observation; Elliott’s worlds fixate on the idiosyncratic, surreal and absurd. Each associative turn seems loaded with news, humour, crisis or intrigue. – Anthony Anaxagorou

Funny, surprising, confronting, lyrical, perceptive and exacting, sometimes within the space of a single poem. Meaty and messy, the images arrive in wads and clumps, but they’re also pithy and agile, addictive and beguiling. Chloe Elliott writes poems like some new, mysteriously branded product from a dream you had last night, which you wish actually existed, and now it does.

-Sam Riviere

Elliott’s Encyclopaedia indexes the complexities of female intimacy, altered states of being and desire. This stunning sequence of poems distorts expectations of love and infuses them with a richness in language.

– Denise Saul