Our Lively Kingdom

Description: ""Our Lively Kingdom" is a poetry collection in four parts, navigating love, children, art, and death. It is poetry of life lived: "and the day begins again, un-remembering and un-making//that which must be felt again each night, the question repeating/and the question being answered." With patience and passion, Julia Lisella writes about the fragility of life fleeting and the interminableness of a prayer"--

Brief description: In addition to "Our Lively Kingdom," Julia Lisella is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Always (WordTech Editions, 2014) and Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007) and the chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems are widely anthologized, including most recently Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry of Protest (South Jersey Culture & History Center, Stockton University Press), To Learn the Future: Poems for Teachers (Scottish Poetry Library), and Sharing the Earth: An International Environmental Justice Reader (University of Georgia Press). Her work appears in Ploughshares, Paterson Literary Review, Italian Americana, Ovunque Siamo, Pangyrus, Mom Egg Review, Nimrod, Alaska Quarterly Review, Antiphon, Ocean State Review, Literary Mama, Salamander, Prairie Schooner, Valparaiso, and many others and she has had her work featured in such collaborative media exhibits as "Lines Connecting Lines 2022" and "TELEPHONE," an international art game. She has received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, Millay, and Dorset colonies, and has received a number of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to lead community poetry workshops. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from New York University and a PhD in English from Tufts. Her scholarship focuses on American women modernists. She is the co-editor of Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement (Lexington Books). She is Professor of English at Regis College in Massachusetts. She co-curates the Italian American Writers in Boston Literary Series at I Am Books in Boston's North End.

Review Quotes: Our Lively Kingdom timestamps the beauty and strangeness of the United States-from poetry to parenting, from marriage to mortality. Strong women ancestors guide these poems that tackle aging, the lynchings of Italian Americans, and what the natural world can teach us flawed humans. It is a wise and emotionally complex collection, one that offers future generations a glimpse of life at this time.