Description:
The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Texas
In the ecstatic tradition, this debut collection considers language as a devotion. Located in an American grain, the poems attempt to enact a collectivity, a body politic, even when the context necessary for collectivity is disrupted--by powerful storms resulting from climate change, by alienation, even by the remediation of the body in airport security lines. Yet, the poet remains stubbornly optimistic, asking readers to recognize that the "world is filling up with/gladness, see. Its utterance/ becomes a door. Enter."Review Quotes: "Reading Lindsay Illich's rile & heave is for me not unlike an enjoyable case of hypnagogia, in which the mind plays between wakefulness and sleep and vacillates between the real and surreal, coherence and fragmentation. Illich's poems are full of grammatical dynamism; her verbing is unpredictable and often surprising. Most significantly, in the hearts of these poems a pulse thrums, an intensity centered on memory. Illich's language reveals how memory is ultimately imaginal, complex, and dreamlike. This is a beautiful debut."
--William Wright, author of Night Field Anecdote and Tree Heresies, Series Editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology.