Books
Swan Songs
The house of fiction that Elizabeth Beck constructs in Swan Songs is inhabited by people we recognize—a woman fretting about the onset of menopause, an art history graduate working in a diner and trying to please her demanding boss, a fastidious suburban mom celebrating Christmas in July, a middle-aged wife playing and living out the soundtrack of her life, an abused wife who hopes her husband will “wind down like a toy with low batteries.” They are none of us, they are all of us. These thirteen stories—many of them more like capsules of memory or character studies—are masterful, treated with minutely imagined details and a deftness that resonates with authenticity and insight.
-Richard Taylor, author of Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landmark
In Elizabeth Beck’s Swan Songs women mourn, grieve, grow, love and explore new paths to an internal soundtrack of modern classics from the Grateful Dead to Dolly Parton. Touching, powerful, and relatable, these stories will linger with you long after you read them.
-Ellen Birkett Morris, author of Beware the Tall Grass
5 Year Anniversary Edition Summer Tour
As long as there are teenagers falling in love with music, books, art, and each other, there will be coming of age stories like Elizabeth Beck’s Summer Tour. Hop on summer Phish tour with Sam and his ‘family’ as they travel the country in an RV named Suby Greenberg, learning how to get by, stay high, and navigate the maze of American adolescence.
-Peter Conners, author of Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead
You Enjoy My Coloring Book
Fun, meditative coloring book for all ages. Visually depicts Phish songs for you to color. Pages frame ready. 8.5 x 11 inch book. With 48 detailed, high-quality images, this book captures the essence of Phish songs, making it perfect for fans who love the band.
Coloring is a meditative practice to center your energies and reduce stress. Use your favorite colors and let your imagination soar as you bring these pages to life. Titles of songs are not depicted on pages. It’s up to you to interpret the images as you like.
Come waste your time with me on the page. The time is near, The mission is clear. Set your gearshift for the high gear of your soul with this coloring book.
Dancing On The Page
What a beautiful collection of poetry that is love and happiness and sadness and loss and gains and beauty and truly, everything all at once. It’s biographical in every way yet wholly relatable page after page. Further, it inspires a mental soundtrack that colors every bit of it, surely, even if you only know some of the referenced tunes. Any lover of life and music will adore this book. It is yet another excellent offering from the masterful B. Elizabeth Beck – I highly recommend it to all, and I look forward to reading it again and again. It’s simply lovely.
-Christy Articola, Editor/Publisher, Surrender to the Flow
B. Elizabeth Beck’s new collection of poems, Dancing on the Page, is an homage to the soundtrack of the process of a poet becoming herself. “I’m still wondering how I am alive” Beck writes in the book’s opening poem, and those that follow illuminate the pathways to not just her survival, but triumph into “air made sweet with paint, music, scarlet / begonias and sugar magnolias dance / to creek’s song.” These poems and their music lead at last to home. Home in the body, home in the music. Home, finally, while dancing on the page.
-Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus, author of Heartbreak Tree
Read and be soothed. Dancing on the Page is a collection that reminds us of the generational memory power of music—that songs have always helped humans “to remember important stories”, to make sense of our lives by bringing the order of an album (or a manuscript) to our experiences. As B. Elizabeth Beck moves fluidly through time in these poems, she offers the reader wisdom across the soundtrack of her life. “Nobody else will ever remember / you. Everyone too consumed / in their own reality…” We are free then—to dance, to deeply feel, to let go what does not serve our song—the wrong husband might just introduce us to the right band.” Beck makes an argument for music being the tool through which we most vividly experience memory; here we are reminded that “music makes sense.”
-Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat
Under The Elm
The Grateful Dead built a substantial following over thirty years, and the living members continue to make important music more than fifty years after the band formed. We’re now seeing third- and fourth-generation Deadheads at these live shows, and the bookshelf of nonfiction books on the subject has grown immense in the last 40 years or so. So it’s not at all surprising to see the Grateful Dead culture depicted in fiction, and especially gratifying to see the culture treated with respect as Beck accomplishes in the final book of the SUMMER TOUR trilogy, Under the Elm. With grace and style, Beck weaves the Grateful Dead culture in a historical novel you will want to share with your children and grandchildren.
-David Gans, author of Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead
The beautiful imagery that pops off the pages of this book, pages that almost seem to turn themselves, is only enhanced by the backdrop of music, friendship, sisterhood, and everything a family can be, all while two young girls discover who they are as women and how the choices they make shape who they become.
-Alecia Whitaker, author of Queen of Kentucky
Mama Tried
We all should have been so lucky to have had the speaker in Mama Tried as our teacher, with her desire to keep all the children of the world safe and fed, and at the same time to be a caring mother for her own child. The poems in this collection slowly reveal the burden of understanding the difficulties faced by underprivileged children in public schools and their devoted teacher’s reaction. “Mother, teacher, woman // who collapsed, howling / screaming pain in empathy”, someone who wakes up early to cook for her students, makes sure they have the right prescription glasses. Someone who suffers the unimaginable loss of students to suicide and stray bullets. The world needs more teachers “Unwilling / to throw up [their] hands”. And we need this book. I am thankful for B. Elizabeth Beck’s brave and heartbreaking poems.
-Katerina Stoykova, author of The Porcupine of the Mind and others
Mama Tried reports again and again on the rage and wonder, the grief and small triumphs of the students in Elizabeth Beck’s classrooms. With a mother’s instinct to keep everyone safe, Beck navigates a world of lockdowns and ICE, of hunger and tears with whatever it takes to shepherd her charges to a safe place. She documents the tragic failings of our political divisions, of our educational bureaucracy, of our own insufficiencies as parents, in lines we cannot turn from. In these clear-eyed poems we witness how with only the simple tools of “gold stars, fire drills, crayons, lesson plans, desks” a necessary magic unfolds.
-Lynnell Edwards, author of This Great Green Valley and others
World Gone Mad
WORLD GONE MAD offers welcome respite in these strange days during a global pandemic. Elizabeth Beck brings back the beloved characters of SUMMER TOUR, this time the story told from a slightly different perspective. We follow the kids as they navigate senior year of high school, face adversities and tragedy, and survive the effects of a global pandemic, all while holding close to the phamily they’ve found in each other.Community has been the most important aspect of being a Phish phan in 2020, and Elizabeth Beck has captured that spirit in WORLD GONE MAD. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
-Elisa Allechant, Host SiriusXM Phish Radio
Summer Tour
“As long as there are teenagers falling in love with music, books, art, and each other, there will be coming of age stories like Elizabeth Beck’s Summer Tour. Hop on summer Phish tour with Sam and his ‘family’ as they travel the country in an RV named Suby Greenberg, learning how to get by, stay high, and navigate the maze of American adolescence.”
-Peter Conners, author of Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead
Painted Daydreams: Collection of Ekphrastic Poems
“B. Elizabeth Beck’s Painted Daydreams is a multi-media experience: While evoking canonic images from artistic icons and iconoclasts alike, from Rothko to O’Keeffe to Basquiat, these ekphrastic poems also allow a reader to eavesdrop on intimate conversations between Beck and these artists who inspire her—the whispers in Van Gogh’s one good, remaining ear backed by psychedelic riffs from Phish and the Grateful Dead. All the while, Beck’s life in Kentucky—the collection’s vivid underpainting—peers through, ensuring that though these poems may well have sprung from the staid environs of art museums, they breathe and sweat in the vivid, living world.”
-Jessica Jacobs, author of unalone
“Taken together, the formally diverse and kaleidoscopically (allusionistically!) rich Ekphrastic poems in B. Elizabeth Beck’s collection Painted Daydreams are a lot more than responses to (or even meditations on) works of visual art. They are a reminder that to live an artful life is to see the art in everything one does, and to feel it in everything one experiences, whether that’s out on a run listening to Phish, walking barefoot in a river, or staring searchingly into a Rosa Bonheur painting and finding there one’s own complicated relationship to the world. Painted Daydreams is itself a vivid portrait of the mind in motion over a lifetime, looking at and being with/in art. As such, it electrifies not only art, but the desire to be alive.”
-Matt Hart, author of FAMILIAR
Interiors (Finishing Line Press 2013)
Mysterious and musical, stitched with an almost-narrative that disappears and reappears like thread, Interiors offers a glimpse into one poet’s transformational journey.
-George Ella Lyon, poet laureate of Kentucky, author of She Let Herself Go
Interiors is full of doorways, transoms, locks, and entryways as well as a claw-footed tub – and poems that explore the furnishings of the mind and heart. Elizabeth Beck’s first book of artful poems centers on the theme of “writing about writing about my life”. Her house is our house.
-Richard Taylor, past poet laureate Kentucky, author of Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landmark