Elisa Gabbert

Elisa Gabbert is a poet, essayist, and critic who connects lyric writing, cultural observation, and literary argument. Soft Skull published Normal Distance in 2022. The collection builds short poems around facts, philosophical puzzles, bodily knowledge, and the limits of certainty, shifting tone and perspective to question what counts as normal or knowable. Gabbert also writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times. Her books The Unreality of Memory, The Word Pretty, The Self Unstable, and Any Person Is the Only Self show the same movement between poetry and essays, with each form sharpening how she reads the other.