Lily Poetry Review Books

Paddock

Praise for Paddock

“I’ll tell you how great this book is: I made my husband sit down so I could read to
him from it. Mary Lou Buschi’s superb Paddock is a fraught dialogue between
two girls, seemingly on a pre-birth or post-death plane, a “made-up kingdom,” as
Girl 2 puts it, while an archetypal chorus offers commentary and lament. The
girls’ speech has the sly wit of Beckett and Lewis Carroll, and evokes the
weirdest, loneliest aspects of the natural world. The poems take us on a
dangerous visit to faerie, a uterine ocean where memories or premonitions of
violation float past, and where prospective parents are spoken about in 3rd
person, lured and reviled. Like all the best poetry, this predicament could be a
metaphor for many different narratives, infertility perhaps, miscarriage, definitely
a history of sexual cruelty, but it’s also extraordinarily expressive of the
exhausting stasis of quarantine. If you, like me, are unlikely ever to be consoled
about certain experiences, this book that refuses to be consoled will be a guide
and companion. In this moment, truly, the darkness of this book is the brightest
thing around.”
—Patrick Donnelly, author of Little-Known Operas, Nocturnes of the Brothel of
Ruin, and The Charge.

About the Author

Mary Lou Buschi earned an MFA in poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a Master of Science in Urban Education from Mercy College. Her poems have appeared in FIELD, Willow Springs, Indiana Review, Radar, Thrush, Tar River, Cream City, Pank, Rhino, The Laurel Review, among others. Mary Lou is the author of one earlier collection of poems, Awful Baby. She is also the author of three chapbooks. Mary Lou has received fellowships from The Santa Fe Writer’s Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and The New York City Teaching Fellows. Currently, she is a special education teacher in the Bronx.

Building Alexandria

Praise for Building Alexandria

Clarissa Adkins has a mind I’d love to inhabit, fully attuned to the strangenesses of love, parenthood, mortality, and fleeting beauty.  These poems are playful, sharp, dextrous, and witty—but they’re also filled with sonic brilliance, her mastery of the musical possibilities of language evident throughout.  This is a terrific first book, one that I’ll return to with great pleasure.  

Kevin Prufer, author of The Art if Fiction (Four Way Books, 2021)

About the Author

Clarissa Adkins lives in Richmond, Virginia and earned degrees from James Madison University and Lesley University. As a high school English teacher, she co-coordinates her school’s Poetry Out Loud program and is a research member of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Culturally Responsive Teaching consortium. Clarissa’s published in The Pinch, Whurk Magazine, River City Poets’ anthology: Lingering in the Margins, Passengers Journal, and more. She earned a Best of the Net nomination from Parentheses International Literary Arts Journal and was a finalist for the 17th Annual Erskine J. Poetry Prize. She reads for Sugar House Review. 

Frances of the Wider Field

Praise for Frances of the Wider Field

Van Prooyen’s poems have clarity and ferocity, a wild imaginative grace that captures the joy and strangeness of our most intimate and familiar experiences–

Sheila Black, author of Iron, Ardent

About the Author

Laura Van Prooyen is author of two earlier collections of poems, Our House Was on Fire and Inkblot and Altar. She is also co-author with Gretchen Bernabei of Text Structures from Poetry, a book of writing lessons for educators. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Van Prooyen serves as Managing Editor of The Cortland Review and lives in San Antonio, TX.

If by Song

Read a selection of her work.

Praise for If by Song

This is the product of years of beautiful painstaking skillful devotion to her art. How many of these remarkable poems are written in this house, and about this house, in the context of its family tragedies. Poem after poem, housekeeping, self-keeping, with the authority of her identity in the power of her writing. I have admired Marcia Karp’s work for years, and now it is here.

—David Ferry, author of Bewilderment

About the Author

Marcia Karp has published poems and translations in journals and
anthologies in England and America, including The Times Literary
Supplement; Harvard Review; The Guardian; Partisan Review;
Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, Oxford
2004-2009 (Waywiser); and The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon
Poems in Translation (Norton). She taught literary and editorial
matters at Boston University after earning graduate degrees there.

Viable

Praise for Viable

In Viable Miller has crafted a measured, nuanced and poignant reading experience, using the eccentricities of English & Italian grammar to interrogate and express her journey through miscarriage to “a human / displacing yesterday’s empty space.”   As she moves from incomprehensible loss to cautious joy to debilitating anxiety, setting “muscular infinitives” alongside the tenuousness of the subjunctive, we feel how language does its aching work.    \– Ellen Doré Watson, author of pray me stay eager

Read a sample of her work.

About the Author

Chloe Yelena Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington,
D.C., with her partner and their child. Miller has an MFA in creative
writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Smith College.
She teaches writing at the University of Maryland Global Campus,
Fairleigh Dickinson University, Northampton Community College,
and Politics & Prose Bookstore, as well as privately.
Her poetry chapbook Unrest was published by Finishing Line Press
(2013). She is a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from
the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities (2020). This is her
debut full-length collection.

Read a sample of her work.

Praise for chicken+lowercase=fleur

For years, the rampant glamor and unrelenting shadows of Christine Tierney’s work have entered my days without warning. Her addictive, agitated imagery and narrative muscle often made me question the urgency in my own work. And now, finally, the talent that’s astounded me for so long is unleashed in this rollicking debut volume. Now you’ll be haunted too. 

                                      — Patricia Smith author of Incendiary art

About the Author

Christine Tierney’s poems and flash fiction have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Poet
Lore, PMS, The Tusculum Review, Permafrost, LEVELER, Sugar House Review
and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from The University of Southern Maine’s
Stonecoast Writing Program, and a BA in film from Emerson College. Her work
has been nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and the Best New
Poets Anthology.

 

Read a sample of her work

Praise for The Body Dialogues

Miriam O’Neal’s The Body Dialogues is rich in detail that engenders psychological insight into her multifaceted world. O’Neal observes with a calm clarity that makes one hover over her exquisite diction, as when she writes, “her hand curved like a whelk shell,”  “..the red bottle—trapped among us / like a hornet caught between panes of glass,” or “the smoky, tin-foil strip of lake.”  This book overflows with memorable lines written with wonderful precision and depth.

~Alan Britt, author of Lost Among the Hours

About the Author

Miriam O’Neal’s first collection of poems, We Start With What We’re Given, was published by Kelsay Books in 2018. She is a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee and was named a Notable Poet for the 2018 Disquiet Literary Prize. Her translation of Italian poet, Alda Merini’s, Poema Della Croce, was recognized in 2007, by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Her poems and reviews have appeared in AGNI, Blackbird Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Passager Journal, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Read a sample of his work >>

Praise for Little What

The poems in ‘Little What’ map a sustained devotion to small details that, under the poet’s attentive scrutiny, blossom repeatedly into surprise and wonder. Jeff Oaks understands the longing and distance that persist even in close physicality and the mystery that can arise from the familiar. Take, for example, the poem “Sunflower”: the transfer from it to us is gorgeous yet careful, as in full of care. I’ve waited so long for this book to arrive in the world. Savor it.

— Ron Mohring, author of Survivable World

About the Author

Jeff Oaks is the author of four chapbooks, The Unknown Country, The Moon of Books, Shift, and Mistakes with Strangers. This is his first full-length collection. He has published poems in several literary magazines, including Assaracus, Best New Poets, Field, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Superstition Review, and Tupelo Quarterly.  A recipient of a Pittsburgh Foundation Grant and three Pennsylvania Council of the Arts fellowships,  he teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

https://jeffoaks.wordpress.com/

The Acute Avian Heart by Joey Gould

Read a sample of their work.

Joey Gould is a writing tutor from a town originally established as a utopian society. Since 2011, they helped orchestrate each iteration of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, MA. In addition, they have written articles for Masspoetry.org & traverse MA as a workshop leader for Student Day of Poetry events in schools. They volunteer for The New York City Poetry Festival & perform as Izzie Hexxam in The Poetry Society of New York’s Poetry Brothel. Always willing to entertain, they have joined a poetry circus, improv comedy/poetry events, & a poems-to-order art gallery event. They curated a special issue section of Soundings East as a returning fellowship alum of & generative workshop leader for The Salem State University Summer Poetry Seminar. A poetry editor in their own right (formerly of Golden Walkman & presently at Drunk Monkeys) their poetry can be found in issues of Five:2: One, Lily Poetry Review, District Lit, Memoir Mixtapes, & The Compassion Anthology, amongst others. They have been a Mass Audubon member since 2008.

Praise for The Acute Avian Heart

The grand motif throughout this stunning debut is what Yeats called “a terrible beauty,” and Gould undergoes transformations—grief, loss, gender, love, sex—in that dangerous place where the human and the terrifyingly endangered non-human worlds overlap.  ‘The Acute Avian Heart’ is a brutal multitude of new, ancient voices, a feast before which Gould examines the guts of their past and present like a haruspex, searching for the precise configurations to carry grief into a  celebration, an impossibility of doors, a world behind each.  Gould is the future songbird, “the robin’s antimatter aloof eye,” through which, for once, the future looks good.

Sam Witt, author of Little Domesday Clock.