Lisa C. Krueger

Description:

Written in memoir form through the language of flowers, this book of poems examines a daughter’s chronic illness in order to consider the vastness of human connection.

Floriography Child is a book about salvation: what gives people strength in the face of adversity, not just to endure, but to move through and beyond our myriad human sufferings. Through poems, micro-essays, and visual art, Floriography Child addresses fundamental questions about purpose, connection, and resilience. Written in memoir form, this book examines the mother-daughter relationship and its intimacies in the context of a daughter’s developing chronic illness. How to bear another’s suffering—how to find sustenance in a world fraught with uncertainty and pain—is addressed through the language of flowers and the natural world. Ultimately, this book asks us to consider how each of us, whatever our path, is connected.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Poems in this collection appear as psalms or elegies for an ill daughter, often rendered through a mother’s obsession with flowers. The poems are like small impressionist paintings by a poet with a controlled hand and eye and strong voice.”
—Dorianne Laux, author of Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems

“In stark movements of mind, the touching and keen language here radiates a mother’s verdant love for a daughter beset with chronic illness. That love is aching and palpable, full of strength and resolve. And thus, the poems in Floriography echo in layers and in Krueger’s profound music, a spirit of wisdom I find rich, intoxicating, and integral.”

—Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man

Description:

Like a photograph seared in the mind, Run Away to the Yard has lasting power, offering its readers the chance to alter assumed perceptions of culture–and of self.

Run Away to the Yard is a unique collection of poems that addresses personal identity within the contemporary culture. In parable-like vignettes and metaphor-dense portraits, Krueger”s poems challenge old notions of self, asking readers to reconsider what brings meaning to daily life. Through the lens of close observation–much like a photographer–Krueger examines the complexity of our responses to a convoluted world. Poems ask us to consider who we are when our lives become stripped of the ordinary and expected, whether that be material commodities, health, daily routines, relationships, even memory. Where, then, do we find meaning and purpose? These poems aim toward greater compassion–for other people and ultimately for ourselves.

Praise for Run Away to the Yard:

“This collection is a powerful and vivid indictment of the spiritual and emotional bankruptcy that our culture of acquisition and consumption has led to. Quietly, and with a cool objective eye, Krueger reveals to us how even the great mystery of death and the wilderness of desire become safe and sterile ceremonies after we’ve domesticated the inner world of the imagination and turned the outer world into a shopper’s paradise. Let those who have ears hear her. This book will make you want to change your life.”— Li-Young Lee

Description:

The poems in Lisa C. Krueger’s Talisman interrogate the everyday expression of complex human emotions. In psychological portraits stunning in their precision, Krueger brings her observational powers to bear on the domestic and its darknesses—childbirth, play, sex, and family picnics, as well as abuse, disability, adultery, and mental illness. We see how intimacy is laced with uncertainty, how the bonds between us can be a form of bondage. Life’s long arc is considered, from the early developmental stages of attachment and individuation to the existential dramas of purpose and meaning in middle and old age. What emerges is a study in the mystery of survival, in how we move beyond the broken places in ourselves. These poems magnify small, everyday redemptions as signs—talismans—of human potential, and ask us to think about our choices, to use language as a force to press against truth.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Lisa C. Krueger writes poetry of otherworldly precision. Her tiniest observations resonate with galvanic force. In this collection, rational thought is turned into exquisite music to invent a kind of new language with which to express the human experience. A cane, a broken tail; flat champagne and a safety pin; everything becomes a talisman—magical, ominous, life-changing. There is hardly a line, let alone a poem, in this collection that isn’t surprising, memorable, and important.”—Laura Kasischke

“The wisdom and lyric grace in these new poems remind me of all that I have come to love about Lisa C. Krueger’s work. They are quiet, and they hum with precision, like exquisite engines. But they are quick, darting, capable of astounding leaps; they lift off from one place and land in another, and suddenly I realize that I have traveled a great distance upon or within them. Yes, this is the deft and moving work of a poet who has discovered how to coax and unravel the mystery within the everyday. But Talisman also represents a furthering or deepening of Krueger’s poetic agency. She is writing with even greater fearlessness, candor and wit about what it means to be human, to live subject to love, memory, desire, and regret. These poems give me heart. Very often in their lines, I feel ‘the world / opening its arms.’”—Tracy K. Smith

Description:

As a psychologist, Lisa C. Krueger is familiar with digging into what makes us human. The joys and celebrations or the pain of what cuts the skin—and what cuts deeper. In animals the size of dreams, Krueger looks into the dark corners and, instead of just shining a light, strips them down to their foundations, until all that’s left is life.

Description:

“Lisa Krueger’s shimmering first collection of poems, Rebloom, is a hymn to the gifts and weight of daily life. Lisa Krueger weaves with stunning simplicity the love, loss, and longing of being, and of being wife, mother, sister, and daughter. She renders daily illuminations behind the veil of everyday routine, the miracles of joy and sorrow. In Rebloom, the final movement amazes us with the great comfort of nature, of the earth, where she seizes renewal of life in the presence of death. Flowers, stem, earth, she sees the whole, and the whole is what heals. By digging, Lisa Krueger aerates the soil of her life, of this our life.”—Maureen Reed

“Lisa Krueger’s poetry mediates the threshold between events and their perception. The ordinary occurrence—reading, jogging, an illness—is saturated with empathy and becomes extra-ordinary. Hers is a narrative of sense. The reader grasps at once the story and its resonance.”—Jeanette Clough