In Premonitions, Elizabeth Schmuhl not only arrives, but sojourns, seeking to become a physical fact of her own environment, and in turn to translate that environment for us in language both sparse and sumptuous. As she sinks into the isolation of a rural property far from human contact, her language assumes the frayed hemlines and feral tones of her setting. It is lush but lean, whimsical but unsentimental.

Elizabeth Schmuhl's debut collection is a study of life. Within these pages, Schmuhl takes her readers on a journey to a place where nothing is fixed and challenges readers to look inward as she dances through scenes of orchards, streams, a barn, and other images of farm life while moving through space and time, life and death. Schmuhl's poems are a delight to read with their movement through time and space and wonderful images, but they are also deeply profound in the way that they speak to the soul of her readers to make us all remember who we truly are, where we come from, and that we are all connected in spirit and in life.

Schmuhl's poems are quick-hitting, but long-lasting. Reading this collection made us want to spend more time outside, to roll around in the dirt, to grow things, to get up and dance (and we do not EVER want to dance).

This poetry is very much of the earth. Its got dirt under its fingernails. The narrator and the landscape at times seem to meld into one.

I think Premonitions is about living in real life, feeling disconnected from all the surrounding life, and feeling comfortable with and becoming part of the earth. Offerings of bodies are made to the earth: the speaker's body, the body of a slaughtered dove, still bloody and beating. Berries are smeared on the flesh bodies get covered with leaves. There is a loneliness that rings through the collection, a desire to disappear from the present form and become enmeshed with the natural and the wild.