The Waiting Girl

“Just as Melville’s Ishmael did when he was ‘growing grim about the mouth,’ with his ‘hypos’ getting out of hand, Erin Ganaway sets sail on an ocean of longing and melancholia and, in the poems of The Waiting Girl, with equally startling and inspiring results. In poems that are remarkable in their honesty, their clarity, and the depth of their feeling, she voyages through lost past, painful present, and fearsome future with the sure knowledge that ‘It is never too late / to regain the place / that means everything.’ What more could we ask?”
—R. H. W. Dillard
 

“In these precise poems, at once bold and vulnerable, Erin Ganaway takes us to the interior of the constructed, fragmented self of ‘the waiting girl’ through landscapes that envelop, tear, and would toss her out. In the action of tracing lineage and of seeing the sensory details of diverse settings, these poems enact uncertainty that the combinations alive in the speaker will finally make their own whole, and yet we are left with some confidence that this is so: ‘…through the froth / I can follow the sun’s porthole / to a lighter place, / surfacing, piercing through / like the lone survivor.’ The journey of these poems shimmers with wonder, a wonder to behold.”
—Cathryn Hankla
 

“Erin Ganaway’s The Waiting Girl is one of the freshest poetry collections I have read in a long time. Brimming with dynamic turns of phrase, rich imagery, and sophisticated honesty, Ganaway’s debut collection explores dichotomies of the visible landscapes she inhabits—Appalachian Georgia and Cape Cod, Massachusetts—and the bipolarities of inner, psychological landscapes. A significant new voice in contemporary poetry, Ganaway stuns with both delicacy and subtle violence, poems of raw energy and meticulous craftsmanship. The Waiting Girl reveals a poet of genuine giftedness, one who will endure.”
—William Wright