Ansel Elkins

Ansel Elkins is the author of Blue Yodel, winner of the 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Believer, Oxford American, Parnassus, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the American Antiquarian Society, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as a "Discovery"/Boston Review Prize. She is is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Berea College. Source

Autobiography of Eve

Wearing nothing but snakeskin

boots, I blazed a footpath, the first

radical road out of that old kingdom

toward a new unknown.

When I came to those great flaming gates

of burning gold,

I stood alone in terror at the threshold

between Paradise and Earth.

There I heard a mysterious echo:

my own voice

singing to me from across the forbidden

side. I shook awake—

at once alive in a blaze of green fire.

Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.

I leapt

to freedom.

Published:

2015

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2024

Themes:

Agency

Faith & Hope

Womanhood