"Elena Karina Byrne's chapbook, NO, DON'T, offers a restless portrait of identity that reflects the shifting terrains of desire and gender, of personal loss and punishing empowerment, and of political and cultural abuse. Under the influence of language's "steeplechase hours," this book's "carnal ambition" becomes a cinematic crash between fate and will as reality marries wild imagination. Each inventive poem turns perception into action and feeling into a musical art of attention as the poet travels between the past and the present, between conscious and unconscious thinking, in order to tell a powerful story"--
