Songs Are Like Tattoos

<p class=ql-align-justify>In <em>Songs Are Like Tattoos</em> poet Elizabeth Majerus uses Joni Mitchell's classic 1971 album <em>Blue</em> as a destination and a point of departure to craft a moving layered meditation on love longing and loss. Understanding the uncanny power that music can exert Majerus knows that certain songs can leave an indelible mark as impossible to shake off as one's own skin. Addressed to you. And you and you. // Whoever you may be-whether absent lovers present loves the reader or the self-these poems enact the painful intimacies of distance and sorrow. Majerus makes out of such sorrow a way to move forward mending. / Ready to be broken anew. Drop the needle on <em>Songs Are Like Tattoos</em> and read it old school from beginning to end then flip it over and read it again. This rich collection like a classic album reveals something new each time through.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Jonathan Weinert</strong> author of <em>A Slow Green Sleep</em> (Winner of the Saturnalia Books </p><p class=ql-align-justify>Editors Prize 2021)</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>If you enjoy music or have ears and a pulse you will love this book inspired by Joni Mitchell's oeuvre with poems that put the needle in the groove and allow the reader to experience the way human relationships can wreck [us] in the best way. Song is the essence in lines packed with internal rhyme and assonance and the drumbeat rhythms of heart and breath. These poems surge and ebb on a river of human emotion. They have an edge often bestowed by paradox as the speaker a chaste little heretic finds her way to a kind of neap-tide quietude a place of adult experience mellowed by wisdom and an earned gratitude.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Rebecca Foust</strong> author of <em>Paradise Drive</em> (Press 53 2018) and <em>ONLY </em>(Four Way </p><p class=ql-align-justify>Books 2022)</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Elizabeth Majerus has written a love letter to the artist and muse Joni Mitchell in <em>Songs Are Like Tattoos </em>threading her own life and others into Joni's lines. Richard isn't Joni's Richard but he's someone's as the child given up for adoption in the poem Little Green is not Mitchell's daughter but another lost child who reverberates into the song. This book is an exploration of how Mitchell's work especially the album <em>Blue</em> ghosts us back to people we used to be. Majerus a musician herself knows the power of music: There are opening notes / of songs that make / my body believe / I will see you soon she says and Joni is on every mix tape her speaker sends.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Gale Walden</strong> author of <em>Same Blue Chevy </em>(Tia Chucha 1996) and <em>Where the Time </em></p><p class=ql-align-justify><em>Goes</em> (Bedazzled Ink 2017)</p><p><br></p>