Personal Injury

Personal Injury is a beautiful emotional look into the struggle of childhood illness, coming of age, and a lasting nostalgia for home.

Praise for Erin Little and Personal Injury

"I am thinking about longing, the oldest poetic concept, and the ways in which Erin Little brings longing to an unmatched understanding, one that is crucial, painful, and innermost in her debut chapbook, Personal Injury. Little is a writer I would follow anywhere. Her interrogations of longing take us through multiple and immediate dimensions: longing through the body as a cancer patient in a hospital; longing through her parents praying for a complete cure; longing as a youth in pain needing to be heard; and longing as an adult feeling love in rain and the rain in love. She implores the reader to be thoughtful with their words-this move hits the highest poetic marks. Little questions the definition of love, and she makes me stop-I turn the corner and this meditation will forever unwind in me."

-Dorothy Chan, author of Babe and Return of the Chinese Femme

"Understanding since childhood that death can come from within, the speaker of these poems is acutely conscious of the various and particular ways her body remains present in the world, as a lover, daughter, observer, friend. Erin Little sets these experiences down with assuredness, even when they hurt. These poems record something akin to what Rilke once described as 'the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long / childhood hours when you were so afraid,' but they also make room for a 'face lit like a bulb / ecstatic as a baby who's found some / thing that moves her.' There's cracks of light in the gloom, there's blood within a life. Personal Injury makes space for all of it, in gorgeous language and wonderfully sharp images. It's a joy to read this work." 

-Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book and Heliopause

"Erin Little's Personal Injury plays with physical harm and emotional hurt as it plays with poetic structures-from the sonnet and the villanelle to the list and the chart. Each poem tangles with its own existence and makes its reader question what existence is for, if not for relishing our entanglements."

-Mark Yakich, author of Spiritual Exercises and The Importance Of Peeling Potatoes In Ukraine