Elle Nash

At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her co-workers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift. The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother’s and boyfriend’s newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete. When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane’s own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby’s arrival.

Through diaristic ellipses, Nash crafts an origin story of obsessional masochism. 2005. Lucy shambles through the last weeks of her senior year of high school, jonesing for a thinner body, desperate to connect with another human. Who is reflected back at her when she is sleeping with someone, when she is puking into the toilet bowl? Who is reflected back when she’s alone? Only the internet knows, where she muses on the concept of her “self” through her Livejournal, with a cadre of online friends who are definitely NOT pro-anorexic. Everyone's sick here, but at least they understand.

In Elle Nash’s stunning and powerful debut, a girl with no name embarks on a fraught three-way relationship with Matt, a satanist and a tattoo artist, and his girlfriend Frances, a new mom. The liaison is caged by strict rules and rigid emotional distance. Nonetheless, it’s all too easy to surrender to an attraction so powerful she finds herself erased, abandoning even her own name in favor of a new one: Lilith.As Lilith grows closer to Matt, she begins to recognize the dark undertow of obsession and jealousy that her presence has created between Matt and Frances, and finds herself balancing on a knife’s edge between pain and pleasure, the promise of the future and the crushing isolation of the present. With stripped-down prose and unflinching clarity, Nash examines madness in the wreckage of love, and the loss of self that accompanies it. Nash's work has been featured in Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire and others.

Elle Nash's “I Can Remember the Meaning of Every Tarot Card But I Can’t Remember What I Texted You Last Night” is a collection of vulnerability and love despite rocky times, telling these stories through the tarot's knowing eye. Elle Nash’s i can remember the meaning of every tarot card but i can't remember what i texted you last night is a winner of Nostrovia! Press’ 2016 N.Y.C. Chapbook Series for reasons written not in stars but in sweat on tangled bedsheets, in the crushed spaces of apartments and the expanse of memory, nostalgia, bitterness, and grief. Refracted to us through the lens of the tarot, the poems here are both mythology and autobiography, legend and confession—it is impossible to read them without wondering precisely whose hot entrails are spread out during this divination, and whether the truths being whispered in the dark are the author’s, the world’s, or one’s own. –Sonya Vatomksy, Salt is For Curing (Sator Press) The poems in this chapbook are those of a witch, a warrior, a wolf, a goddess with claws. Elle Nash is able to balance the hilarious and tragic, the heartbreaking and the furious. She will slay you, and you will love her for it. –Juliet Escoria, Witch Hunt (Lazy Fascist Press)

Beginning with a story of an ex sex-worker drifting through a small rural town in the south, and ending with a young woman’s wedding night, who learns from her new husband what it takes to kill a man, Nash writes across the complications of working class women, rendering their desires with visceral prose and psychologically dissecting the fundamental root that threads her work: craving and the conflicts within.