Passage
an essay by Ellene Glenn Moore
 
Winner of The 2022 Orison Chapbook Prize
 
*Available for pre-order.*
 
Orison Books
paper  /  $14.00
Print ISBN: 978-1-949039-54-2
E-book ISBN: 978-1-949039-55-9
Distributed to the trade by Itasca Books
952-223-8373  /  orders@itascabooks.com
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
 
ABOUT THE BOOK
 
Unfolding over the course of a single day, Passage is an account of the author’s thirtieth birthday aboard a sailboat as it makes its way from Nantucket Harbor to Menemsha Harbor. This long-form lyric essay charts the many passages of that day: civil dawn to astronomical dusk, one harbor to another, one decade of life to the next, present circumstance to distant memory, external landscape to internal obsession. It tells, in the end, the story of the self as a threshold through which the mind must pass on its journey to understand itself. 
 
PRAISE

"Passage is a book that lingers. Softly moving between stunning imagery and heartfelt storytelling, every line offers itself to opening the eyes and hearts of readers. Full of rich detail and stunning line level construction, this is a book meant to be savored and returned to time and again."
—Athena Dixon, author of The Loneliness Files
 
"'Do I defeat myself at the outset? Or do I create myself?' is the inquiring heart of Ellene Glenn Moore's Passage, a long-form lyric essay that reckons with memory, mortality, marriage, and motherhood. The precision of Glenn Moore's language, the sophistication of her thought, and the honesty of her self-inspection put me in mind of some of my favorite essayists-qua-philosophers, including Lia Purpura and David Foster Wallace. Set on a single day aboard a sailing ship in New England—the day, in fact, of Glenn Moore's thirtieth birthday—readers will marvel at the landscapes both witnessed and plumbed. Here, the view outside: 'The fog looks innocuous, the water glamorous. There hardly seems space for shadows to live.' Here, the view within: 'Perhaps even I may disappear, unless I can give others the language to see me.' Language received; perception made possible. Passage is a triumph of eye and mind."
—Julie Marie Wade, author of Otherwise: Essays and Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 
Ellene Glenn Moore is an American writer living in Zürich. She is the author of How Blood Works (Kent State University Press, 2021), winner of The Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. She holds degrees in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University, Florida International University, and Bath Spa University, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on hybrid genre texts and hybridity as creative practice. She is the recipient of a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellowship in Poetry, a scholarship to The New York State Summer Writers Institute, and a residency at The Studios of Key West. Ellene’s poetry, lyric nonfiction, and critical work has appeared in West Branch, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.