Causa Sui is a collection that engages deeply with poetic tradition but, more importantly, hungers for a reality better than the one we have at hand. “Sometimes I want to take // the world between my hands & shake it / really hard,” admits the speaker of one poem, “& sometimes I want to read // it like I would a favorite novel, slowly, / over a season.” Elizabeth Knapp has unerring instincts for how to carve a line, whether from intimate memory, reflections on pop culture, or the raw clay of ChatGPT. This is a bold, potent book written in time—a record of anger, a marker of the will to endure, and a celebration of wit and its power to instigate.
—Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode
With burnished lyricism and uncanny wisdom, the poems in Causa Sui ask what it means to make art at this post-pandemic, post-insurrection moment in history, calling upon pop culture as well as Western philosophy, Greek mythology, and the reality of active shooter drills. The humor in this book is both arch and necessary; we find ourselves in a dark time and place in which Americans devise “new & inventive ways of / killing each other,” then “hide / the evidence” before “set[ting] the forest on fire.” Causa Sui will give you the courage to reenter and reclaim this broken world. The songs we keep sustain us, Knapp says: they “open themselves & take flight.”
—James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy
Furious, sorrowful, and hilarious, Causa Sui is a full-throated lamentation for the America of our dreams. It speaks directly to our present moment, where “we’re always on the cusp / of catastrophe…simmering on the stove of history.” Knapp draws on all the material of our “simmering” world—Britney Spears, the Ancient Greeks, Project 2025, assorted philosophers and poets, ChatGPT—to craft glittering sonnets, erasures, couplets, and found poems. She takes the measure of our current reality— “This is how we do it in America, big fat clouds / like blank checks over our heads, our SUVs // parked in the driveway like slumbering gods”—asking, “how can we / save ourselves from ourselves when / we’re holding both the gun & the target?” Darkly funny, sharply self-aware, yet deeply felt, these poems are essential reading for anyone stunned and stumbling through our times.
—Kirun Kapur, author of Women in the Waiting Room
ISBN: 979-8-218-70632-6
Trade Paperback: size 6 x9
Price: $18.00
Publication Date: September 2025
Elizabeth Knapp is the author of two previous poetry collections, Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2019), winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, and The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011), winner of the De Novo Poetry Prize. She is the founding director of the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Hood College and lives in Maryland with her family.
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