"So Neon Was the Rope is a trip and a half. It’s how I’d want to write if I was Elise Houcek, but unfortunately, I am not. Just when I’m ready to say that her use of language is like another divorce, I find myself laughing at a line’s sublimity, and it takes a lot, these days, to draw out that kind of laughter—a stinger from a bee. She builds a bottle tree and shakes it so hard the bottles break and make a tinkling sound, a femme death rattle. I love how these poems estrange me from every facet of language’s potential banalities. They strike me as messages from a far-off future I won’t live to see, neon and alien, where a portal opens to something strange enough to revivify the human."

 

         –Diane Seuss

           author of frank: sonnets