Eliot Schain
Eliot Schain
Eliot Schain’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Santa
Monica Review, and Miramar, among others, as well as in a number of anthologies,
including Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California and The Place
That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed. His book, The Distant
Sound, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2020. Earlier books include American
Romance and Westering Angels, both from Zeitgeist Press. Selections from The Distant
Sound have been recorded and released as a digital album in collaboration with guitarist
Harrison Flynn, available on Apple Music and Spotify. A newer collaboration, Drive,
They Said, also with Harrison Flynn, is available as well. Schain has served as program
director for The Poetry Society of America, taught high school, and currently works as a
psychotherapist in Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife, Mary D’Elia.
The Distant Sound
The Distant Sound is a prismatic meditation on what it means to be human, especially when the body and mind seek their own paths to heaven. The poems employ the long Whitmanian breath and are often narrative, but with mysterious syntax whose goal is to bypass reason and activate the heart. Various themes are woven through first- and third-person accounts of the land, the divine, the dynamics between men and women, of humanity’s limits versus our imagination, and of poetry itself.
Read poems from Poems from The Distant Sound by Eliot Schain.
“Eliot Schain is a treasure—a poet with a sharp edge and a broad canvas. Some artists have irony, some have vision; Schain has both and tests them against each other with fire and wit. The results are wild, beautiful, and necessary.” – D. Nurkse
“An unforgettable modern voice…in Schain’s poetry, the inexhaustible American hunger confronts its limits—wilderness defiled by industry, the nuclear family gone ballistic, love turned impossible Here wisdom and madness live side-by-side, take the reader’s hand, and walks us toward the uncertain future. Once you have heard his cadences, you will not forget.” – Bruce Isaacson
The Distant Sound is featured at Katherine Hastings’s Word Temple blog (May 26, 2020).