Cori A. Winrock is the author of This Coalition of Bones (Kore Press), which received the Freund Prize for a first collection. She is the winner of the 2016 Boston Review Poetry contest and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Best New Poets anthology, West Branch, Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing and Literature program at the University of Utah where she is a Tanner Humanities Fellow.

“Throughout her second collection of lyric poems, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, Cori A. Winrock explores the experience of mourning: specifically, the idea that grief is an ongoing, recurring experience that never truly goes away. It is simultaneously universal and intensely personal … The incalculable physical distance this book of poetry travels mirrors the incalculable distance a grieving person must travel to get back to earth.”
—Charlotte Hughes for Cleaver Magazine

“The grief in this collection is dense enough to enact its own gravity, enough to pull a person off the surface of the earth into the cold, white distance of space, or more specifically, to render a person encased in a spacesuit, each its own cut-off world for the individual inside it.”
—Nina MacLaughlin for Boston Globe

“The highly original second book from Winrock... [Little Envelope of Earth Conditions] erupts with sound and imagery that gives shape, color, and texture to grief"
—Publishers Weekly

"The cliche is to say there’s no handbook to grieving, but Cori A. Winrock’s Little Envelope of Earth Conditions is about as close as it comes."
—The Poetry Question

“This is a heart-breaking, beautiful book, yes. But also one in which grief lights the page, as the poet tells us: ‘What is grief but a syllable that accumulates / us of our gravity.’ Having known loss, what does she learn? What knowledge is shared here? Knowledge is in the questions. Winrock is a brilliant lyric poet who shares: all we say, we say in a body. Nothing can be said outside it. What is the lyric poet doing in this book? She grieves and sings. She whispers about mothers, about daughters, she composes elegies, pastorals. ‘Our bodies have been exposed to all sorts of things. // The stars don’t believe in weeping us / to sleep.’ This knowledge is desolate, but it frees us: ‘our bodies pinned open into the last kind blues.’ This is the last frontier: ‘Listen, listen— /every time I’ve tried to bring our baby back // to the ground in our old city.’ I love the duality of this voice. Its tenderness and its ringing grief.” 
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

In Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, there is a deepness so vast one cannot tell if Winrock speaks from inside a hole she dug through these poems, or the poems speak from a hole dug through Winrock. Is the moon above or below? Is grief a tourniquet wound around the missing? Or is grief a tourniquet unwinding into a brightening path? To write these poems, I get the feeling Winrock's heart must wander out of orbit, into the unimaginable, while her blood pumps in hundreds of directions at once. We need these poems to keep us company while we mourn for everything we've ever lost because "even the woodsmen / with their stethoscopes pressing the leaves // like dresses, like X-rays: cannot summon the dead." We need these gorgeous poems more than ever.  
—Sabrina Orah Mark

”As I read Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, I started to wonder why I had for so long worried, and lately come to believe, that lyricism was fading from American poetry, because as I read Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, I felt the lyric beauty of the poems was at times as overwhelming as any in the language. But these poems are nonetheless utterly themselves, and if they sometimes call to mind great lyric poems that came before them, they do so because Cori A. Winrock, like all the best poets, has somehow, miraculously, allowed herself to sound exactly like herself, and has made thereby a book both inevitable and unforeseen, and new.”
—Shane A. McCrae

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