FORTHCOMING

My Prayer A Slit Throat

Spring 2026, Wet Cement Press

Winner of the New Constructions Hybrid Book Contest

CURRENT RELEASE

An image of the book cover for Love as Invasive Species. A Girl, holding up a mask with a lion's nose to her face. Her hair is a mane in which flowers, grasses, and fauna such as bees, caterpillers, a tarantula, an egret, and slugs emerge.

Cover Art © Maiko Kikuchi

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“Ellen Kombiyil deploys collage as a mode of hue, memory practice and lyric entanglement. The winner of a prize for hybrid writing, this book proposes hybridity as a parallel occasion, a side-by-side of image and text that's also a rift in the capacity of the poet to bring together the "perfect and burning" parts. Instead, the fragments "accomplish" their own atomic work, dispersing and re-convening at the level of sound: ‘a/spectacle/of/rhythm.’"

Bhanu Kapil, on My Prayer a Slit Throat

Winner of

The TQ36 Prize for Cross Disciplinary Writing

Judge's Citation:

"Ellen Kombiyil uses redaction, collage, and recombination to expose a dark history. The result is both acerbically witty and harrowing, a master class in the potentials of image and text."

- Hasanthika Sirisena

Awarded for my work "American Journal of Insanity" which can be read in Tupelo Quarterly

Winner of

The Geri DiGiorno Multi-Genre Prize

The prize was given for a poem “Translation” and an erasure + visual poem “Squad Tactics as Equations Depicting Loss” from the Guidebook for Marines (1954), which are from my forthcoming book-length visual lyric essay My Prayer a Slit Throat: erasing the inheritance of war.

Purchase the issue that contains the prize winning work here