Description: What happens when the imagined life and the stories we tell ourselves become terrifying, given our human ability to inhabit both mental and physical worlds? Bertram's third full-length collection of poems shows how the factual is tinted and stylized, filtered through a self grappling with the difficulty of knowing what is "real."
Brief description: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram's first book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen, 2012), was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Benjamin Saltman Award. She is also author of a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen, 2016) and a chapbook, cutthroat glamours (Phantom Limb, 2013). She holds degrees in creative writing from the University of Utah, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Carnegie Mellon University, and is now assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts - Boston.
Review Quotes: "Touched but never bound by singular doctrines of narrative, lyric, or experiment, her poems merge linguistic zeal with capacious imagination." - Terrance Hayes, on But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise "Lillian-Yvonne Bertram . . . lives, brilliantly, with whole heart, whole mind, and whole body, in the contradictions. . . . She shows us . . . that Illusion is the Medium Which Allows Emptiness to Become Something Special, and I love this book beyond loving." -Sarah Vap, on a slice from the cake made of air