Wish Ave
Wish Ave
Alessandra Lynch
“A key to this simmering, unblinking cautionary work is offered in the quiet line: ‘Why has nobody taken care?’ It may be that poetry itself is always taking care, filling with care the world we inherit. The essential dialogic nature of this book (‘who is that sound?/what is the wound?’) establishes the voices in this head, headlong encounter with the world, answering for our human failure to care properly or enough or in time. There is a grandeur about such a style and project that might remind us of the Brownings, both Robert and Elizabeth. The speaker and voices carrying across and through, answers and questions in various orders, the birdfeet and human bodies, burning forests, more questions and one Michiko who leaves at the beginning but is never gone and then returns, like the book itself once it enters the reader’s mind. It is as though Wish Ave is the response to the bird in Eliot’s first quartet, about just how much reality humans can bear. Alessandra Lynch has written beyond the moment, and deeply of the moment, a form of salvation we must all hope to earn.”
—Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth
October 2024
ISBN: 9781949944662
Available in both print and digital formats.
Photo by Robert Presutti.
Alessandra Lynch’s most recent collection of poetry, Pretty Tripwire, was published in 2021. It was semi-finalist for the Julie Suk Award. In 2023, the poem “Hymnal” from Pretty Tripwire was used as the libretto for composer Harriet Steinke’s eponymous song cycle. Alessandra is also the author of three other poetry collections: Sails the Wind Left Behind (winner of the Alice James New England/NewYork Award), It was a terrible cloud at twilight (winner of the Lena Miles Wever-Todd Award), and Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment (winner of the Balcones Prize, finalist for the LA Times Book Award and the UNT Rilke Prize, listed as a NY Times top ten poetry books of 2017). Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The New England Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. Alessandra has received residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Lannan Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She has also been the recipient of a Barbara Deming Award and a Creative Renewal Fellowship Award from the Arts Council of Indianapolis. In May 2021, she was a featured blogger for Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books.
Currently, Alessandra serves as Butler University’s poet in residence where she teaches in the undergraduate and MFA programs. Alessandra’s fifth book of poetry, Wish Ave, will be published by Alice James Books in 2024.
Additional Praise:
“The promise of Wish Ave is clear from its first poem: if we understand that things, with or without us, engage with other things, we can tend the world (and so, ourselves) to points of deepest interchange. In this dreamy, fiercely alive book, Lynch’s intimacy is never a construct. It’s learned, celebrated, grieved, and spoken, gesturing to her readers to come closer to the world all we can. With her, we remember Roethke’s musical incantatory phrasing, Merrill’s ear to the afterworld, Grossman’s trust in all form as dialogue, and we reel with the possibilities for reality made beautiful as only Lynch can voice: ‘Snow as the ghosts of stars, Stars, the ghosts of knowing…’ and “—who is that sound?/ What is the wound’. This work is necessary, and superb.”
—Kathleen Peirce
More by Alessandra Lynch:
“This space is left empty to create a white space. To create a white separation block in these individual book pages, add a Quote Block”
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