RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS is a poet, writer, photographer, and painter. A Cave Canem Fellow, she received an MA in English Literature from the University of Delaware and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her literary and visual work has been published in periodicals including The New York Times, Indiana Review, Black Arts Quarterly, and African American Review. She lives in New York.


“These poems soar with stunning lyric grace and yet we feel their earthly and epic gravity along the lengths of our bones. ‘The beauty of wreckage,’ Rachel Eliza Griffiths tells us, holds beauty. From wreckage and from beauty, she reinvents, revises, and rejuvenates the Icarian tale, balancing perfectly the weight of desire upon the rare edge of thinnest air. From the frayed threads of the mythic, she reweaves the familiar into the strange, the oft told into the wholly uncanny. The Requited Distance is a breathtaking performance.”—Eric Pankey

“The myths and ancient images in Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ The Requited Distance disobey their own narratives. They wander into each other’s stories, get possessed by another’s myths and challenge the old music with their questions to the point where the labyrinth they create becomes the birth canal out of the one within which they are supposed to be captive. There is a surreal, unsettled beauty in these re-settings and these ancient dreams invade our own time with their inevitable augury.”—Ed Roberson

“Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ concerns are wide as a church door and as deep as a well. They serve her needs and ours. Her wounds are deep, and her victories glorious. She writes in different styles and voices—sometimes in the same poem. Her ancestors are Greek choruses, oratorios, and The Supremes. Listen to her.”—Stanley Moss

“Highly recommended.”—Yusef Komunyakaa