Praise for Theory of Impact
In Theory of Impact, Lisa Sullivan uncovers the long aftermath of her father’s military service—its fear, tenderness, and bewildering intimacies—without accusation or explanation, even as other absences such as childlessness move quietly through the book, their contours felt in the life around them. The poems unfold through startling imagery and associations: a father draws maps in pencil, which he would “erase, erase, erase”; a shell lifted from the shore holds “its aperture dark.” Only in the closing poems, when Sullivan encounters her father’s Marine Corps letters once sent home, does another history emerge: mosquitoes, rifles mottled with rust, the rigid discipline of combat drills, and the place where men are taught to kill. The book’s seemingly scattered histories converge, pressing inward, until what was lost reclaims its rightful place, returning to the speaker “again, part of me.”
—Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest and Bad Harvest.
On Any Bay
Evening mist obscures
the moored boats. But we
hear their gentle rock – a faint
knock of wooden elbows,
remember the sea’s debris
that flocks between them
until their next journey.
We are all
driftwood.
About the Author
Lisa J. Sullivan is a New England native who holds an MFA in Poetry
from the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program, where she was
a Kurt Brown Memorial Fellow. Her poems, book reviews, and artist
interviews have been widely published. She was the United States winner
of The Poetry Project–Ireland in collaboration with the Academy of
American Poets and was an Adrian Tinsley Program Creative Grant
recipient. Lisa is the Art Editor for Lily Poetry Review and a Poetry
Editor for Pink Panther Magazine. Theory of Impact is her debut poetry
collection.