At the Foot of the Mountain
TAK Erzinger

​TAK Erzinger brings to radiant life the feelings of solitude, trauma, and healing in her poetry collection At the Foot of the Mountain. With deft precision, Erzinger puts tangible sensation to events and emotions that often exist only in the ephemeral space.
 
A child of multiple cultures, Erzinger weaves a tapestry of her Colombian/American beginnings in poems such as Latin Roots and Menage a Trois. Her soul is brought forth, unflinching, to answer questions of identity and belonging, like in Canto de mi Sangre. These are recurring themes that she examines with unabashed honesty. In the cataclysms of being lost and found, it is confronting the pain that brings forth the healing.
 
Mental wellbeing and the voyage towards it are shown through a lens of deep familiarity and gentleness, like a dear friend sitting at the kitchen table. Alongside her poems of heritage, Erzinger also writes of her home in Switzerland. Using images of nature, she reveals glimpses of her path from illness to thriving life, and how that path is never a straight line. The namesake poem at the end of the collection speaks of this riot of emotion: wild/ fights that we’ve fought/wild/ trails through the forest /wild/ at each other’s side /wild/ at the foot of the mountain.
 
At the Foot of the Mountain is a celebration of life in all forms, from loss to love, from identity to family. It is Erzinger’s remarkable ability to make real the unspoken that sets this collection apart.

TAK Erzinger is an American/Swiss poet and artist with a Colombian background. Her poetry has been featured in Bien Acompañada from Cornell University, The Muse from McMaster University and more. She lives in a Swiss valley with her husband and cats.

At the Foot of the Mountain will be published with Floricanto Press and is forthcoming.

Reviewed by
Kaitlin Felix
3/22/2021

Kaitlin Felix is an author of Historical Fiction and Fantasy. Her work has been published internationally, most recently in the upcoming Althingi: One Will Rise - an intersectional historical fiction collection in collaboration with Outland Entertainment. Adopted and raised in El Paso, Texas, Kaitlin now lives with her multicultural family between the UK and Switzerland.

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