Author: Claire Hsu Accomando
Paperback, 74 pages
ISBN: 978-1-7330413-3-1
Claire Hsu Accomando lives in Bonita, California, and defines poetry as distillation: you start out with a truckload of potatoes and end up with a shot of vodka.
She was born in Switzerland to a Chinese father and French-Armenian mother. She spent her early childhood in rural France, separated from her father who was in China during WWII. Her memories of the war years are collected in her memoir, Love and Rutabaga, first published by St. Martin’s Press (with a 2025 re-issue), and released in a French translation in 2020 by L’Harmattan. Reunited after the war, the family moved to New York when her father joined the United Nations.
Accomando’s poetic memoir Evaporation was published by The Press at Cal Poly Humboldt in 2025. Lifting Elephants is her second full-length volume of poetry. Her poems have also appeared in journals including Atlanta Review, Mudfish, Toyon Multilingual Literary Magazine, Slab, The Year in Ink, and Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Her artwork has appeared in Three Hearts: An Anthology of Cephalopod Poetry, Moon Water: An Anthology by Spell Jar Press, and JustArts: Call & Response. She also has published nonfiction in Ararat, Critical Flame, Women in World History, The Christian Science Monitor, Artweek, and other publications.
Praise For Lifting Elephants
“In this new collection, the words of Claire Hsu Accomando do indeed lift the weight of 150 elephants, as the first poem tells us. The poet’s words are like blocks of Carrara marble that can sink into the sea, or by the hand of the poet, open to release the form within. What Accomando has achieved is a cycle of poems that bear the weight of a long and nuanced memory of Armenian, French, Chinese, and American heritage, yet rise, soar beyond the page, with both humor and pathos. She knows too well the violence of generations, how many ways blood can be shed — blood on a bicycle, blood on books. She also knows the deep tenderness of sustained love. Yet, no trace of sentimentality underpins this collection. Her wit, and the wisdom that comes with a life lived long and well, inform these poems, buoy them up out of suffering, loss, into a rich transcendence.”
— Robin Davidson, author of Mrs. Schmetterling, Houston Poet Laureate (2015-2017)
“Claire Hsu Accomando is a memory keeper. Through wit, humor, and open-hearted tenderness, we receive the gift of fully embodying the people and places of her collected experiences. Lifting Elephants is a poetic journey of learning one’s self, acceptance, loss, and most profoundly, vulnerability. Accomando bears witness across generations, continents, and the multitudes of the human experience.”
— Tony Wallin-Sato, author of Okaerinasai
“Lifting Elephants is a closely observed collection of poems that documents the wonders of everyday life alongside loss, random violence, and war. In this vibrant world “among broken glass/ and debris from the past/ a forsythia bush blooms, an explosion of yellow” and “fat porcupines of mistletoe” sit on willow branches. In this world memories are our truest treasures.”
— Barbara Brinson Curiel, author of Mexican Jenny and Other Poems
“Lifting Elephants is an inviting examination of the human condition that reaches beyond and beneath the quotidian. Accomando’s verse threads through a wide variety of subjects and rhythms, some as smooth as silk, others staccato-like, something here for every reader to savor and enjoy.”
— Allen Wittenborn, author of The Defiance of Reiko Murata
“Accomando is an embodied storyteller whose sensorial language and palpable presence invite the reader to feel connected to and grounded by her work. This collection is a salve in these surreal times, offering hope, awe, and humor — with cameos by birds, histories of color, and nuns’ underwear, but also by grand figures like Henry Thoreau, Edith Piaf, Russian aristocrats, and quotidian heroes like beloved teachers, family members, caregivers, those who serve. Lifting Elephants is more than a poetry collection, it is an illuminated portal into Accomando’s life and insights, both astonishing and sobering.”
— Jennifer Derilo, Professor of English at San Diego Mesa College