She works as a translator with The Basque Literature Series.[2] Her work has appeared in The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker,[3]The New York Times, Paris Review,[4]The Threepenny Review,[5] and The Yale Review.[6]
Around her poetry Elizabeth Macklin uses grammar as a scaffolding of detachment. She builds precarious platforms that enable her to see her past and her family and to sort through the chaotic pain of memory: to examine the deceptive facets of truth. These poems parse life's sentences. Tension arises from how Macklin tests grammar's ability, both as metaphor and as the raw material of language, to enclose her oblique and urgent questions. Sometimes her grammar is playfully inflected -- she watches, in an altered state, a wisp of smoke rise, "high, highest, higher" -- sometimes dead serious.