“It’s What I’ve Got Left cuts through inheritance, womanhood, and survival with an attentiveness to what endures-and bites: memory lodged in the body, belief revised but not erased, love that refuses to loosen its grip. In poems that braid lyric intensity with narrative pressure, these pages trace how harm and devotion spool forward and back across generations, testing what love will and will not allow. Prose poems such as “Dear Third Born Child, I Promise I’m Trying, Love, Mom” and the searing “Notes for My Daughter As She Prepares for Her Most Public Sexual Assault” unfold through instruction, footnote, and reckoning, holding rage and tenderness in the same breath. Elsewhere, moments of hard-won clarity flare unexpectedly: “let the water make the world a conch,” a line that listens for vastness without judgment. Allen writes poems that stay-echoing, spiraled, alive to what cannot be unlearned.”
Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest and Bad Harvest
About Lisa Allen
Lisa Allen’s (she/her) work can be found in Lily Poetry Review, December Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bear Review and MER, among others. She has received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations and was a 2022 Best of the Net finalist for her poem “Prolapse: Etymology,” published by South 85 Journal. Lisa holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the Solstice Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Lasell University, where she was a Michael Steinberg fellow. With Poet Rebecca Connors, she co-founded and co-directs the online creative space The Notebooks Collective (TheNotebooksCollective.com).
