A native of Atlanta, Elizabeth Seydel Morgan is the author of four previous poetry collections. Morgan lives in Richmond, Virginia, near her three children and five grandchildren.

Praise for Spans

“One of the great pleasures of poetry is the new cast words give familiar moments, objects, feelings. That’s the great gift of Elizabeth Seydel Morgan’s new collection, Spans: the wry, amused, understated, often sharply pointed take of her saying. The effect draws close the landscape, the weathers of mood, the intensity of experience as if, as in Dickinson, all is truly itself for the first time. Only a pro writes this well, and few do it for long. This is a remarkable accomplishment, a splendid selection and a brilliant collection that ought to earn Morgan devoted new readers. Cheers to this fine poet.”—Dave Smith, author of Hawks on Wires

“Elizabeth Seydel Morgan’s poetry has always, to paraphrase James Brown, taken us to the bridge. Lucid and visceral, knowing and sexy, reverent and ballsy, her limber, tensile lyrics allow the worlds of Eros and Thanatos to exchange their secrets. The great gift of Spans is the chance it affords the reader to cross and re-cross life’s bridges in Morgan’s perspicuous, wry, and irresistible company. Whether shocked into awed silence by the theophanic appearance of a heron in the front yard or shaking, with Hopkins-haunted despair, ‘a cramped fist to God for crippled things, / for all things clotted and kinked,’ these poems are keenly attuned to laughter and weeping, ‘the truest sound[s we] make.’”—Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Vanitas, Rough

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