Interviews, Readings, Workshops
Interested in interviewing me, booking a reading, or a workshop? Please email me at eachilles@gmail.com
Reviews for Diagnostic on the Plumbing & Wiring of Females
"The American Journal of Insanity’s Diagnostic on the Plumbing and Wiring of Females ... manages to be beautiful, funny, and stingingly insightful all at the same time.”
— Justin Lacour
Reviews for Love as Invasive Species
"This collection, notable for its stylistic gravitas and formal experimentation, illuminates the life-worlds of four generations of working class women in Kombiyil’s family as if they are circuits waiting to be electrified: like bulbs drawing moths to light, their memories are bright and dead-hot. "
—Nicky Yeager
“Reading this book is a physical experience, and that fits the subject matter well. Readers are encouraged to get inside the book, almost taking it over – the way memories that are passed down and called love take us over, invading the present, interpreting how we see the present. ”
Read the full review — Katie Kalisz, MER
"Love as Invasive Species restores the voices of women who came before us to expose the buried trauma held deep inside, the “dull ache that insists / the body open."
— Vincent Norman, Harbor Review
"Love as Invasive Species is a must-read: it raises urgent questions about how we love and care for one another, especially our daughters. These concerns feel especially pressing today. And just as love has no single point of departure or origin, neither does this collection."
— Shannon K. Winston, The Inflectionist Review
"Ellen Kombiyil’s book is a quirky collection, not only for the poetry to be found therein, but for the structure, a tête-bêche, a head-to-toe or inverted book, with two beginnings and two ends that meet in the middle... It says something about the bridges of generational voices, which is one subject of her poetry—the book includes a family chronology linked to external events such as the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision."
— Susana H. Case, North of Oxford
More Reviews
Sundress Authors' Picks for Best Reads of 2015, The Sundress Blog
Cambridge Writers' Workshop Recommends: Here's to 2016!, Cambridge Writers Workshop, Diana Norma Szokolyai
The Wardrobe's Best Dressed, Sundress Publications, T.A. Noonan
“I have lived with Histories of the Future Perfect for several weeks now and it is quite frankly one of the best new collections I have read for a long time. The range is astonishing, leaping with remarkable skill and subtlety from trilobites, to interstellar travel, to distressing elegy and scientific speculation, all held together by three ‘recurring’ sonnets which are striking in their representations of personal loss and memory.”
— Tim Vallence,
Sabotage Reviews
"Enter a world where nothing is off limits for exploration: history, mythology, love. Dive to the deepest depths of the ocean and travel as far as the imagined reaches of outer space. Slip into the skin of the philosopher, historian, astronaut, necromancer, classicist, adventurer–all as imagined by the contemplative mind and lyric lilt of the poet. Give yourself over to moments as beautiful as they are thought-provoking–'My mouth / at the moment of loss unbinds a thousand // mouths all making the same sound'–and know that these are the ripples circling out across the waters of this one-of-a-kind collection. Welcome to Ellen Kombiyil’s Histories of the Future Perfect."
— Sivan Butler-Rotholz
diode
“Kombiyil constantly attempts to fit fragments of disparate imaginations within the width of a uni-directional narrative; moments decked with rich elements shimmer through the layers and build a life of their own. As one starts moving through the poem, these moments come together to create conflicts in one moment while maddeningly rushing back and forth to create a tentative sense of euphoria...”
— Samantak Bhadra,
Rain Taxi
“The experience of time and memory creates a feeling in the body that can draw one into a memory at any moment. Kombiyil here shows a mastery in blending different levels of discourse—familiar, friendly, scientific. The shifting language, blended with a constant familiarity and openness, allows the reader to be drawn into this experience of time without question.”
— Kendra Bartell,
Monologging - A Local-Global Collaborative Magazine
“Overall, this equation of macrocosm and microcosm, science and personal reflection works, particularly in pieces like “Wave Oscillation as Time Loop”, where swimsuit bottoms and astronauts inhabit the same poem. The simultaneous suspensions of immersion in water, outer space, and time feel like appropriate, almost necessary, parallels: “sun flanked by black it flashes past/spinning before reentry”. An ambitious and intriguing collection, Histories of the Future Perfect is worth a read.”
—Sarah Syvarnam,
The Quilliad Press & Publication