Vigil is an ode to creating—to following a path from a dimly-lit home through a quiet wood, to the banks of a watercourse and back again. This collection, Chiyuma Elliott’s second, is set across a range of physical and formal landscapes that are visited by charming spirits, Ambition, Love, Ghost, and Bird. In the company of these guides, Vigil contemplates life, loss, and what sustains us.

These poems are devotions to the kinds of vigils each of us has known: telling stories about the stars, planting a garden, and awaiting a lover’s late-night return home. Introspective while eschewing isolation, Vigil untangles the complexities of love, loss, and healing.

PRAISE FOR THE POETRY OF CHIYUMA ELLIOTT

“[These poems] wait patiently for the reader to inhabit them, to assume the experience of the lives explored in them. Elliott, with an unbridled generosity of spirit, encourages us to undertake this task, a challenge which we absolutely should accept.” RALPH PENNEL, Rain Taxi

CHIYUMA ELLIOTT is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A former Stegner Fellow, Elliott has published 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, Cave Canem, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her first book, California Winter League, won the 2014 Unicorn Press Editor’s Choice award.