Lily Poetry Chapbooks

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The Palace of Unbearable Feeling

Equally resonant as visual chants or textual mandalas, these 18 poems emerge from the international lineage of concrete poetry. Written during the pandemic in response to prolonged isolation and the perils of a world on tilt, The Palace Of Unbearable Feeling’s verbal-aural-visual compositions present a variety of opportunities for contemplation.

FIELDNOTES

In Fieldnotes, Tommy Archuleta is witnessing the contemporary, but believing in more. It’s a belief always at crisis, and all the more powerful for that, as those we the earthbound “’Withdraw step/ by step      yes/ But to what.” It’s a realm of dual planes, whereby one consciousness records fieldnotes from the universal terrain of Loss, while another, given wholly to transformative continuance, presents a travel diary out to map a landscape where one never encounters “the same ghost twice.” These notes present unavoidable, necessary evidence, and I’m most thankful for their arrival. 

Johan Gallaher, author of My Life in Brutalist Architecture

VOZ

“The poems in Jennifer Jean’s new collection VOZ are a wonderful amalgamation of intelligent and historically aware formal pressures intertwined with an irrepressible joie de vivre animating the language and imagery (even when their subjects are difficult). The work here has such a living pulse, such clarity and warmth and ease in its expression, that I hungered for more by the end. A really wonderful book that all lovers of contemporary poetry will be happy to have in their collections.”

—Erin Belieu, author of Come-hither Honeycomb

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Chapbook Catalog:

A Can of Pinto Beans

“I have admired Robbie Gamble’s work for many years as it appeared in print and online journals. However, in reading these poems all at once, in one stellar collection, I feel the top of my head taken off. The collage of forms: memo, logbook, persona poem, and prose poems all serve to insure that the reader cannot look away from people coming with “unanticipated speed, in waves, on leaky rafts, [  ] or blistered feet/ on their last/ drips of adrenaline.” Weeks after encountering this work,  the images of a Hello Kitty Backpack, a can of pinto beans, and the marked location of the scapula still rise unbidden in my mind. These are necessary poems; poems that will change you.”   

                                       –Susan Rich, Gallery of Poems and Maps: New and Selected Poems

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Wild for Life

“With precise language and deep self-awareness Margot Wizansky writes her way through the aftermath of a near-fatal medical emergency that left her in a week-long coma and months of gradual rehabilitation. Her poems thoughtfully consider her family’s stunned love in crisis…the careful dance of redefining intimacy with her husband as her body and mind return to her…” Robbie Gamble

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/Klaudz/

These poems surprise and delight! Mary Buchinger hasn’t just written about clouds; she’s harnessed the experience of cloud watching. The variety of visual forms coupled with fanciful titles and the use of words like “salamanderly” make me feel as though I’m cloud watching with a playful friend, yet the poet’s extensive vocabulary and explorations of desire and faith turn this into a more mature experience than the childhood pastime I thought I knew. 

~ Katie Manning, author of Tasty Other and editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review

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Aporia

“In a landscape springing from the long-term sequelae of Alzheimer’s, Eric Hyett is the rain. His mother, poet Barbara Helfgott Hyett, is the pavement. No, is that right? As seasons in Aporia unravel, Eric’s mother is suddenly the rain, and he is “completely alone / in the village of unsolicited advice.” With brilliant vulnerability, these poems illustrate transformations of identity in the context of disease – the blurrings of mother and son, patient and caregiver, poet and poet, the rain and the moon. “You’re responsible for all / of this, as she takes my wrist. // Unfortunately, that’s true, I tell her. // My mom says: Well I hate it. // I would hate it too.” This collection is critical for any family confronted by Alzheimer’s diagnosis – indeed, any family that’s human.”

~ Robert Carr, Author of The Unbuttoned Eye

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Cry Sweat Bleed Write

Cry Sweat Bleed Write by Kay Bell. Find out what it means to be “sponsored by aching… to plant grief in a garden… visit periodically.”

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Doll

Elizabeth Dorsey Mercurio’s chapbook, DOLL brings us “closer to dawn” and “the envy of winter trees.”

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Legs All Shining Down

Mary Lou Maloney’s poetry “pays attention/to a sky with a wild/streak of chartreuse” dying to amuse us.

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Sister of the Heath

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Object Lesson

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All Small Planes

“We’ve lost more Americans to the opioid crisis than to the Vietnam War. Eric Roy begins this extraordinary chapbook by asking that you conceptualize this number….These poems are for the ever-shrinking number of people that don’t yet know someone taken or affected by this crisis. Now you know someone. Here is a face, a life, you can recognize when you hear of the ever-increasing numbers.  All Small Planes takes an abstract idea, a number, and makes it personal. It paints with gorgeous spiraling language to frame a context. It’s a frank and honest portrayal of addiction and the people left behind. ” 

~ Keegan Lester

Florence Nightingale’s Lost Log

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