Lynnell Edwards

Description:

What can we bear and what can we lift when a beloved, when our world, is light-struck and mad? The Bearable Slant of Light documents a web of clinical assessments, medications, the terrible beauties of delusion, and the fragile gifts of darkness. Poems that reach across the history of writers and artists who fought and sometimes lost their own battles against mental illness are set against the urgencies of our anxious world and the intimate struggle of one family.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“What if you were to write a book of poems expert in their formal invention and so varied in tone that the anger and helplessness and desperation of the poems were also shot through with a tough-minded, often darkly humorous intelligence sifting through possibility after possibility of solace and finding, after all that sifting, nothing but a pile of dust? No consolations, no moments of redemption, nothing but the hard and strange and always original perception of ‘it happened this way but never the way I expected.’ Well, this is the kind of book that Lynnell Edwards has written—a book whose occasion is the mental illness of her son, but whose subject is radical estrangement/self-estrangement. Her fierce response to the myth of therapy/wellness/amelioration demonstrates a poet of superb gifts. Prose poems, lyrics, dramatic monologues, meditative flights giving way to beautifully precise descriptive writing—no form of poetic inquiry is beyond her imagination’s tenacious, tender, and skeptical engagement. On every page, the intelligence of the writing is matched by true integrity of feeling.”

                                                —Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch

Description:

“Lynnell Edwards’s third poetry collection, Covet, is a fascinating wide-ranging examination of desire. From the small and antique—a “Tinderbox Chamberstick w/Flint and Cover,” say, to the middle distance of “Available Light” and everyday life, to the wild freedom of turkey vultures “soaring / each spring over Pine Mountain,” her poems are witty, lyrical, commonsensical, and marvelously bold. This is a book worth coveting.”— Kelly Cherry

“Great beauty, these poems understand, often steals in unexpectedly—the bird through the window, the forsythia that erupts out of a wintry landscape. Again and again we encounter here “the breath of the ecstatic”, hearts “filled to bursting” “rush[ing] and skip[ping],” “thumping in [their] box[es].” Edwards knows how quickly the visions she seeks to capture fade to “ordinary pain.” The trick—one these lovely poems manage over and over—is to be the camera “shutter’s click and whir, imperceptible / as hummingbird’s wings.” I finished these poems grateful for their acts of thievery, their coveting. What a beautiful and accomplished book.”— Davis McCombs

Description:

With The Highwayman’s Wife, Lynnell Edwards’ fierce and brazen poems breathe new life into well-known myths and tales, giving a new, bold voice to characters such as Medusa and Helen of Troy. Equal parts graceful and audacious, Edwards’ poems capture her genuine love of language while maintaining a charming style all their own.

Description:

As a writer of drama and short fiction, Edwards’ first collection of poetry is influenced by the character sketches of her earlier prose works, while maintaining a strong sense of lyricism. Like her influences, Sharon Olds, Rainer Rilke, and Sylvia Plath, Edwards’ poetry derives force from its candor and observational simplicity. A Kentucky native, Edwards continues in the tradition of great pastoral voices such as Robert Frost, drawing from his metaphorical, lyric and structural paradigms. Reading The Farmer’s Daughter evokes fields of space, filled with light and soft shadows.