Incidental Pollen

Description

Incidental Pollen

Poems by Ellen Austin-Li
ISBN: 978-1-963695-25-0 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-26-7 ebook $9.99

May 20, 2025

RUNNER-UP FOR THE 2023 ARTHUR SMITH POETRY PRIZE

Incidental pollen refers to pollen that collects on bees as they forage for nectar—like the cumulative life experiences we cannot help but carry. The hive serves as a thematic thread in this collection that explores the space between past and present, shame and redemption, grief and resilience. Poetic forms lend meaning—like the villanelle that captures the grief-driven magical thinking of the speaker. Are recurring red fox sightings visitations from her deceased father and nephew? Trauma and loss appear in these tonally rich and imagistic poems, but the arc ultimately centers on the search for belonging, the attempt to recreate home.

Praise for Incidental Pollen: Poems by Ellen Austin Li

In Incidental Pollen, the presence of the bee hovers over lives, dreams, memory, and beloved dead—a conduit for poems that speak a language “native to wounds.” Some formal, some tightly structured free verse, these poems at last look fear in the face and refuse to stay silent. Lean in and listen to them hum.—Meg Kearney, author of All Morning the Crows and The Ice Storm

“We eat what we need,” Ellen Austin-Li writes in the opening poem of her remarkable first full-length collection, Incidental Pollen. These powerful poems are rich with sensory, musical, and emotional detail and yet they ache with hunger. Her work is a reminder of the ways in which art in all its forms has the power to feed in how it connects us with each other and with the world.—Pauletta Hansel, author of Heartbreak Tree, winner of the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2023 North American Book Award

Ellen Austin-Li has been both a healer and one in need of healing, recounting in this wrenching collection the amplifying grief of accumulated loss and the apocalypse of addiction. In seeing her experiences as part and parcel of the cycles of nature she observes around her, this poet of stunning candor and empathy expresses the fullness of her hard-won wisdom.—Iain Haley Pollock, author of Ghost, Like a Place

Ellen Austin-Li’s first full-length collection, Incidental Pollen—a 2023 Trio Award finalist, a 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series semi-finalist, and runner-up for the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize—is forthcoming from Madville Publishing. Finishing Line Press published her two chapbooks, Firefly (2019) and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021). Her work appears in Artemis, Thimble Literary, The Maine Review, Salamander, Lily Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, and many other places. She’s a Best of the Net nominee and holds an MFA in poetry from the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen co-founded the monthly reading series, “Poetry Night at Sitwell’s,” in Cincinnati, where she lives.