BOOKS & CHAPBOOKS
CATECHESIS: A POSTPASTORAL
The University of Utah Press, 2019
“A girl has two choices: / to be a tree or / to be the forest.”
Catechesis combines Grimm fairy tales with horror movies and the Book of Revelation to construct a vision of the dangers and apocalyptic transformations inherent in girlhood. This lyric lore, which includes curious diagrams and collages of the botanical and the anatomical, contains hidden instructions to prepare girls for the hazards ahead.
In retelling lore alongside other Grimm-style stories, the poet turns horror classics The Silence of the Lambs and Alien into macabre fairy tales in their own right. Herein lurks violence and decay, but also a wild, overgrown beauty. Mothers and fathers are as much a part of this treacherous landscape as the carnivorous flora and shape-shifting fauna—and their effects are just as devastating. Framing all of this within biblical language and motifs gives these fabulist poems an ominous sense of urgency. Catechesis is a hybrid collection of textual and visual poems that examine belief and obsession. It explores how beauty leads to danger and danger births another kind of beauty, in a cycle of creation and destruction. (ISBN 9781607816973)
This debut poetry collection was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. Published by The University of Utah Press on August 1, 2019.
Finalist for the 2018 Dorset Prize
Semifinalist for the 2018 Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes
The University of Utah Press, 2019
“A girl has two choices: / to be a tree or / to be the forest.”
Catechesis combines Grimm fairy tales with horror movies and the Book of Revelation to construct a vision of the dangers and apocalyptic transformations inherent in girlhood. This lyric lore, which includes curious diagrams and collages of the botanical and the anatomical, contains hidden instructions to prepare girls for the hazards ahead.
In retelling lore alongside other Grimm-style stories, the poet turns horror classics The Silence of the Lambs and Alien into macabre fairy tales in their own right. Herein lurks violence and decay, but also a wild, overgrown beauty. Mothers and fathers are as much a part of this treacherous landscape as the carnivorous flora and shape-shifting fauna—and their effects are just as devastating. Framing all of this within biblical language and motifs gives these fabulist poems an ominous sense of urgency. Catechesis is a hybrid collection of textual and visual poems that examine belief and obsession. It explores how beauty leads to danger and danger births another kind of beauty, in a cycle of creation and destruction. (ISBN 9781607816973)
This debut poetry collection was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. Published by The University of Utah Press on August 1, 2019.
Finalist for the 2018 Dorset Prize
Semifinalist for the 2018 Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes
...[W]elcome to a world that is as familiar in its twists and churns, as it is uncommonly new. Lusby, through tales old and popular-cultured, has stitched a Frankenstein's infant for us. You will marvel at this daring and true collection. And if, at end, even your appetite feels treacherous, at least you feel alive enough to hunger.
—Kimiko Hahn, author of Brain Fever and Toxic Flora
Lindsay Lusby takes fairytales and horror movies and twists these stories into utterly new creations. Here the Brothers Grimm’s “Maiden without hands” is a girl who elusively “prefers to imagine herself a bird” and asserts “An unhanded bird / is still a bird, / is still worth its weight in breadcrumbs.” Time and again Lusby splinters off from language’s predictable paths: “If a felled girl falls in a forest, / does it sound // inevitable?” In her collages, as in her poems, there are no barriers between humans, animals, and their environment, which results in eerie butterflies with bones and plants sprouting tooth-blossoms.
—Matthea Harvey, author of If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?
Both raw and beautiful in its rendering of terrors, Catechesis reforms moments of gendered violence into moments of transformation, in a dynamic illustration of Adrienne Rich’s feminist tenet that “her wounds came from the same source as her power.” From the mythic allegories of the Woman of the Apocalypse, to cameos from pop cultural badasses Ellen Ripley and Clarice Starling, the poems here rise like flames in a fire that razes a land so that it can be made new. Lusby’s language is like the “flint-strike of tooth on light,” and this book is “such lungspan, / such bright palpitation” from beginning to end.
—Sara Eliza Johnson, author of Bone Map
Lusby’s shivery sequence strews a trail of gems through fairy tale’s shadiest, most iconic location—the Forest. We meet our heroine in very unfortunate medias res—under the axe—but which way will fortune tilt? As each lyric spills its elixir, a swarm of dialogue and diagrams, allusions and images cluster like corpse-fauna, rise. Catechesis reminds us that every occult canon, every sweet herbarium is a library of poisons, and invites us to drink deep.
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Red Bird and The Commandrine and Other Poems
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CHAPBOOKS
Blackbird Whitetail Redhand (Porkbelly Press, 2018)
Limited edition, hand bound. This second chapbook is a linked series of lyric fairy tales in three parts: the girl with no hands & the girl with cloven feet & the girl who gave birth to an apple. These little books have letterpress-printed covers, featuring vintage wood & metal type, and are bound by hand using a Japanese stab binding technique. Edited & designed by Nicci Mechler, Porkbelly Press. You can buy a copy here.
Blackbird Whitetail Redhand is a book of chaos, transformation, and all the little possibilities tangled beneath the night clover. It is a simultaneously tumultuous and quiet narrative of bodily autonomy and the sacrifices needed to achieve it. These are poems rattled with the snapping of bear traps and the sharp, tangy bite of an ax kissing the trunk of a tree. Lusby leaves you asking: is she the sweet flesh of the fruit fruit or the sharp teeth? Listen for cloven feet over the thicket. If you catch sight of her, marvel at her mottled heart. Be careful not to make a sound, “she’ll move like scattershot” if you do.
Imago (dancing girl press, 2014)
This first chapbook is a poem series that tells the coming-of-age fairy tale of a girl and an eggplant. Edited & designed by Kristy Bowen, dancing girl press. Cover photo by Emma Sovich. You can buy a copy here.