The Little Bat Trainer

“The desert, ‘hoax of the dry,’ and the water; the living and the dead; the fallen and the saved; nature and the ‘worked world’; the self and all that endangers the self—these are elemental binaries that embrace in Gwen Ebert’s The Little Bat Trainer. In her first book, Ebert has fashioned a cosmos. Lyric and narrative, prose poem and meditation gather companionably. Within this volume’s compass, the contemporary and the biblical commingle and inter-illuminate. Past and present are braided together. A bell’s ‘cling,’ ‘cling,’ ‘cling,’ iterates the governing trope of these poems. This is, finally, a work of astonishing reconciliation. From a contemporary culture of fracture, Ebert has forged a work of embrace and magnanimity, a work that is without irony, a work that is wholly compelling. The Little Bat Trainer is bitter, rapturous, lamenting, furious, and entirely original. ‘I was the stone embedded in Goliath’s forehead. I was the Centurion’s gorgeous boot . . . I was the bullock waiting to burn for Baal.’ This book is a vision. A grand debut.” —Lynn Emanuel