Ellen Rachlin’s latest collection of poems, At the Big Bang Resort, is forthcoming in Spring 2027 from Red Hen Press.

When young high priestess Enheduanna is sworn in to protect her people, it draws the attention of rebel leader Lugalanne, who’s intent on stripping her of power. When Lugalanne’s coup is successful, Enheduanna finds herself at the mercy of the underworld—though she soon discovers the answer to all her earthly problems is right in the center of the underworld’s treacherous forest. To have any chance of restoring her rightful place, Enheduanna must pass the test and become as ruthless as the very man she’s trying to beat.

Ellen Rachlin’s first novel, Enheduanna's Song From the Sands fuses ancient Mesopotamian history with myth.

Winner of the 2018 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Silver Award. Ellen Rachlin’s new book is intriguing, ingenious, and deftly wrought, a delight to the mind and the spirit. About it, Elise Paschen has said, “In her stunning new book, Ellen Rachlin explores, as if from a philosopher’s point of view, the world around her.” Molly Peacock adds, “In her splendid fourth collection, poet Ellen Rachlin explores what she calls the ‘Permeable Divide’ — the breach between living and a loved one lost to death, the gap between confidence and hesitation, the gulf between banking and art, and perhaps most devastatingly, the chasm between freedom and habit.”

Ellen Rachlin’s remarkable debut book of poems, Until Crazy Catches Me, has been greeted enthusiastically by pre-publication reviewers. Elise Paschen has commented that “in Until Crazy Catches Me, Ellen Rachlin imparts her unique take on the things of this world – where the philosophical is rooted in the concrete and where the need for distance is constantly undercut by a desire for proximity. These dueling tendencies play out against Rachlin’s vast canvas, from a domestic childhood scene of canning tomatoes with a grandfather in the Adirondacks to an adult scenario where the speaker observes a beloved swimming out to sea off Corsica. Rachlin establishes her distinct voice throughout these well-wrought, linguistically engaging poems.”   And this from Marjory Wentworth: “Ordinary objects and landscapes seem suddenly brilliant and suffused with meaning and resonance we had never considered. The result is lasting and enormously satisfying.” Phillis Levin has written as follows: “What if Daphne had gotten away? Facing, even pursuing, what she flees, Ellen Rachlin keeps her balance while shuttling between distance and intimacy. Her style is nimble and nervy; her persona lucid, cryptic, whimsical, courageous, and fleet. She has an eye for detours, kinship with netherworlds, radar for the uncanny. Until Crazy Catches Me introduces a poet whose manner is, by turns, deceptively candid and clearly ambiguous. Yet among the dangers and pleasures and mysteries, the glimpse most bittersweet is a pile of lemons ‘dumpling-shaped / with soft pits and shadows’ – a tribute to homegrown sensuous truth, a memory so lush it perfumes the present, ripening our sense of the future. Here we feel and see how the act of dwelling – an art of surrender – elicits transformation.”

Chapbook, published in the United Kingdom by Flarestack Publishing, 2009.

Chapbook, published by Finishing Line Press, 2004. 

Finalist in New Women's Voices Series.