Ellen Rachlin’s remarkable debut book of poems, Until Crazy Catches Me, has been greeted enthusiastically by pre-publication reviewers. Elise Paschen has commented that “in Until Crazy Catches Me, Ellen Rachlin imparts her unique take on the things of this world – where the philosophical is rooted in the concrete and where the need for distance is constantly undercut by a desire for proximity. These dueling tendencies play out against Rachlin’s vast canvas, from a domestic childhood scene of canning tomatoes with a grandfather in the Adirondacks to an adult scenario where the speaker observes a beloved swimming out to sea off Corsica. Rachlin establishes her distinct voice throughout these well-wrought, linguistically engaging poems.”   And this from Marjory Wentworth: “Ordinary objects and landscapes seem suddenly brilliant and suffused with meaning and resonance we had never considered. The result is lasting and enormously satisfying.” Phillis Levin has written as follows: “What if Daphne had gotten away? Facing, even pursuing, what she flees, Ellen Rachlin keeps her balance while shuttling between distance and intimacy. Her style is nimble and nervy; her persona lucid, cryptic, whimsical, courageous, and fleet. She has an eye for detours, kinship with netherworlds, radar for the uncanny. Until Crazy Catches Me introduces a poet whose manner is, by turns, deceptively candid and clearly ambiguous. Yet among the dangers and pleasures and mysteries, the glimpse most bittersweet is a pile of lemons ‘dumpling-shaped / with soft pits and shadows’ – a tribute to homegrown sensuous truth, a memory so lush it perfumes the present, ripening our sense of the future. Here we feel and see how the act of dwelling – an art of surrender – elicits transformation.”