A Conversation with Elisa Gabbert

“ANYTHING YOU DO every day—that’s your life,” writes poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert in her new collection, Any Person Is the Only Self. Across 16 essays, Gabbert reveals that she has spent her life reading books. Whether she’s roasting Ray Bradbury, mourning Sylvia Plath, or marveling at the implausible details of Percy Shelley’s death, Gabbert’s work is searching and dialectical—always curious, never performatively clever.