Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers was raised in North Carolina and educated at Oberlin College and Cornell University. She also spent several years in rural China, where she taught English and dance. Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Crab Orchard Review, AGNI Online, FIELD, and other journals. Rogers is currently an inaugural fellow at The Kenyon Review and lives in Ohio. This is her first book.

Books by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers:

Other poems on the web by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers:
Three poems
Two poems
Three poems
"A Map of Shanxi"

Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers's Website.

About Chord Box:

"The exquisite structures and beautifully realized harmonies of Chord Box belie the notion of ‘first book.’ Music—its seduction and discipline—is at the heart of these poems that are themselves gorgeous with sound—their lines turned and tuned with such care they seem incised rather than written. The erotics of knowledge evolve in a powerful coming-of-age sequence that is also the biography of an education. The moral shadings are subtle, the story fragmented yet legible as power relationships—illicit passions, unsanctioned devotions—gradually unfold. Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers taught in rural China, and her poems that draw upon the experience brilliantly interrogate assumptions and press the grounds of understanding. The struggle to learn a language—whether Chinese, English, or music—becomes a means of voicing the charged territory between solitude and community, distance and proximity. These elegant poems also are tough-minded and edgy: ponticello, played near the bridge, a position that yields ‘the rawest sound / on stringed instruments.’ Both sensual and cerebral, Chord Box oscillates with gravitas and light: an indelible debut."
—Alice Fulton

"A stunning first book by a remarkably mature young poet, Chord Box deftly foregrounds both the language of sound and the sounds of language. The first sequence, weaving the often conflicted experiences of a guitar student and her teacher, uses the language of music to explore, through synaesthetic metaphor and other tropes, emotional and bodily territory. The final sequence takes the poet to China, where the sounds of a new language, as well as its visual representation, move her ever more deeply into emotional and linguistic complexities of equivalence, dissonance, and cadenced resolution."
—Martha Collins

"Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers draws her readers in, deftly and carefully, to embark on a journey of discoveries. Music is often her subject, and music constitutes her method: the music of storytelling, of pain and joy, of continual discovery and insight. With a sureness of touch and an economy of means, she gifts us, again and again, with stunning poems. This is a truly remarkable first collection."
—David Young