Books & Writings
Dancing On The Page
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 final book of the SUMMER TOUR trilogy, Under the Elm operates as a prequel. Flashback to 1979 with Karen and Maggie when they move with their parents from Willow Grove, the commune where they grew up, to Maywood, Ohio into what will become Calico House. Follow these characters as they learn to adjust to a suburban lifestyle while still remaining true to their love for the Grateful Dead and the community they developed in their hippie days as they settle into their new lives.
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
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 Teenaged Deadhead
Momma Tried
“If I do not write today / I will never write another poem” – let us be grateful, then, that B. Elizabeth Beck wrote that day, and many others, resulting in the poems that make up her new chapbook, Mama Tried. And try she does, this mother and teacher. Perhaps the best word to describe this collection is fierce – both the poems and the poet. She writes with passion, and compassion, for her students, “Lost casualties / of a public education that speaks /about serving but never actually does / anything beyond talking”—children dealing with poverty and shattered homes and, for some, the constant threat of deportation, struggling for an education in the midst of active shooter drills and a society that views them as marginal. And as the mother of a child with a blood disorder, a child she admonishes to “Quit growing up so fast”, Beck also confronts the long, often blind journey of parenting, “a series / of choices. Where / is that handbook I / received when you / were born?” In a way, she creates a handbook here, reminding us all of the most important lesson: “don’t give up / you matter.”
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, SiriusXM Host 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
“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
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 L. Taylor, past poet laureate Kentucky.
insignificant (Evening Street Press 2013)
In insignificant, Elizabeth Beck provides compelling witness to the violence – and its tragic after effects that too many girls suffer, without the ability to give it this kind of important voice. In stunning imagery, Beck sheds light on what can only be called crimes against humanity. -Sue William Silverman, author of Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You
My poems and essays have found homes in The Blue Mountain Review, Suisan Valley Review, Kudzu Magazine, Poetica Magazine, Her Limestone Blues Anthology, TRIVIA, Chaffey Review, Evening Street Review, Pluck!, Red River Review, Rusty Nail, Harvard Education Press