Elizabeth Clark Wessel, originally from rural Nebraska, now lives in Stockholm, Sweden and works as a translator of Swedish literature. She’s the author of four chapbooks, and her poems have appeared in Fence, Boston Review, and American Poetry Review. None of It Belongs to Me (Game Over Books, 2024) is her first full-length collection.

Other poems on the web by Elizabeth Clark Wessel:
Four poems
Five poems
"A Girl and Johnny Tremain"
Two poems
"Everything Will Be Fixed by Love"
"A Woman and a Bird"
"Love Poem at Thirty"

Elizabeth Clark Wessel's Website.

About None of It Belongs to Me:

"In this book, poetic awareness pops out of the everyday like sparkles from an arid landscape, gleams on a classic car, a tin can in the sun. You can be in a bar holding a cup of coffee and travel to the geological strata under your table, travel through the years and the world, talk with a deceased friend, feel how life grows within a body, remember the early days of love and witness—in sum—the eternal sunshine of a brilliant mind."
—Marcelo Morales

"How long is a life, and how many lives do we live, in a day on Earth, in our ordinary bodies, afraid and in pain and in love? None of It Belongs to Me is full of the secrets that only poems can tell, the advice only poems can give. I loved this book for its distance and closeness, its billion-year view and its details. 'This is the order of things. / First one thing, and then the other. / It's taken me a long time to understand this.'"
—Elisa Gabbert

"Clarity and fluster, stacked up and toppling, startling lines, ordinary words. The poetry of Elizabeth Clark Wessel is one of my favorite conversations, and I am so—so—so jumped-up that this book is in the world."
—Daniel Handler

"In Elizabeth Clark Wessel's poetry, the world is realistic and yet completely unrecognizable. A woman moves around inside her home or through her city, preoccupied with the work of reproduction or human relations, thinking about death and cultural history. Everything is mundane and undramatic, but at the same time the boundaries between bodies dissolve and the proportions of things are distorted, beneath the calm lies the threat of disaster, and every gap might open up into an existential abyss. With subtle humor and a continual sensitivity to words, Clark Wessel translates between experience and language, between one language and another, and ultimately between an individual and her society. There are no reconciliatory syntheses in her poetry, only an intense and expansive view of the human condition and an infectious faith in literature's ability to reveal the world anew."
—Athena Farrokhzad