Filled with rich evocations of childhood, travel and landscape, Fielder's Choice, Elise Partridge's masterful debut, delivers up fresh and striking elegiac poems that grapple with their subjects vigorously, unpredictably, and without sentimentality. Partridge's poetry combines a gifted ear for the vernacular and exuberant verbal skills with an exceptional-and often emotionally powerful-lyric intelligence.

Elise Partridge's Fielder's Choice was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poems in Canada; her Chameleon Hours was a finalist for the BC Book Prize, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award, and was featured in the Washington Post "Poet's Choice" column. Her work has been anthologized in Canada, the U.S., Ireland, and the U.K., and has appeared in Arc, Poetry, The Walrus, The New Yorker, The Fiddlehead, Slate, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Southwest Review, Yale Review, and The New Repulic.

Elise Partridge's profile page

"An exemplary book, and a debut to celebrate." --National Post

"Exquisitely restrained." --Vancouver Sun

"Partridge's adjectives bristle with life." --Books in Canada

"Partridge's work with interiors (of houses and women) and exteriors (the garden as feminine space) is especially insightful and rich." --Canadian Literature

"Witty and compassionate, her polished stanzas [are] neat--but not too neat--in scansion and rhyme." --The Bostonia

"Elise Partridge is a gift: a writer with a heart unashamed to tell us what it loves." --Stephanie Bolster

"Fielder's Choice is an exemplary book, and a debut to celebrate." --National Post

"Partridge is a connoisseur of her surroundings, and can deliver a rich and textured palette to her readers." --The Montreal Gazette

"[These poems] should place Partridge among the best of the newer Canadian poets using form." --Globe and Mail