Staff Pick
Lynch's devastating collection pulls no punches, in spite of its delicate prose. A fragmented trauma narrative pieced together from the author's own experiences, Lynch forces the reader into a body that feels alien and uninhabitable after the violence enacted upon it. Daylily struggles to process and verbalize her memories as she attempts to normalize, drifting through her own life as a spectator, by turns overwhelmed by rage, numbness, grief, and loneliness, as well as joy, triumph, and love. An astonishing meditation on how trauma bleeds into our bodies and the world we move through, as well as a celebration of our survival.
*big trigger warning for SA. Recommended By SitaraG, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
With a music prowess both deft and ferocious, these empathetic poems in Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment woe and terrify simultaneously. Terrible things happen in this book and it s wonderfulsuch is the redemptive power of poetry this exquisite. Dean Young
This heart-wrenching book examines the tensions between the harshness of violence and the beauty of everyday life. There is a discourse with the wreckage in these poems that infiltrate life after trauma and violence as it perpetuates onward, pulling us into the speaker s domain and the endless cycle of attempting to overcomewithout forgetting the past.
Alessandra Lynch is also the author of Sails the Wind Left Behind and It was a terrible cloud at twilight. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. Alessandra was born on the East River and now lives with her husband and sons by a stony creek, two hackberry trees, and a magnolia trio. She teaches in Butler University s undergraduate and MFA programs.
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