Editor’s Choice in the Unicorn Press First Book Award

“Elegant and mysterious, the poems of Chiyuma Elliott’s California Winter League confront pain with wit, loss with stern tenderness. ‘Don’t look back,’ reads the book’s epigraph, from Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige, ‘Something might be gaining on you.’ But they do look back, and draw us into that devouring with an assurance as of dream. This is a first book of astonishing beauty.” —Ann Fisher-Wirth, author of Dream Cabinet and Carta Marina

“Chiyuma Elliott is a believer in total immersion. With an ease that nearly belies their depth, her poems take you in. The resonant world California Winter League comes from the poet’s almost physical need to create interior space wherever she can find it—in the mind of her childhood hero, Satchel Paige, in stories of family and erotic love, in sensual still lives, and finally, in the stunning last section of the book, in time itself. This is a devotional book, but there’s nothing dutiful about it. Ardor fuels these poems, and cunning crafts their arrangement. California Winter League has some of the best page turns in contemporary poetry today, at one point, taking the reader with trust and courage from an imagination of Satchel Paige’s interior life to the unquestionably real details of a woman’s sexual life. The poems are as intimate as a honeymoon and as full of secrets as a funeral.” —Katie Peterson, author of The Accounts

“Chiyuma Elliott looks directly at the past and finds her poetry’s purpose there. Whether writing about the dark moments of our collective history or history close to home, Elliott goes deep into the trouble of who we are. ‘Pain is in the details,’ she says in one poem, fiercely and tenderly committing herself to the redress that is poetry’s vital work.” —Rick Barot, author of Chord and Want

Chiyuma Elliott is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A former Stegner Fellow, Chiyuma has published poetry in the African American Review, Callaloo, the Notre Dame Review, the PN Review, and other journals. She has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is currently at work on a poem cycle called Vigil.