She read Spanish literature at SUNY Potsdam, and Complutense University of Madrid.
[6] In May 2000, The New York Times' Deborah Weisgall noted:[10] 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.
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.