Blade Work -- Lily Brown

Winner of the New Measures Poetry Prize<p>Free Verse Editions</p><p></p>What People Are Saying<p>In the tradition of such poets as Laura Jensen, Jean Valentine, and Saskia Hamilton-yet utterly their own-Lily Brown's poems spring from ordinary enough spaces-the natural world, domestic life and what goes on there-but as if these were the understory to a vast forest of waking dream, of the "general and particular/rhymed to</p><p>dream's interior." The poems are governed, I would add, by dream's particular, elusive, strange logic, all the stranger for how persuasive and authoritative it is while refusing to be mapped or, indeed, explained. I trust these poems, as I trust their way of thinking-a way that, by the book's end, feels like the only way of proceeding: not past mystery, but deeper, into it. -<strong>Carl Phillips</strong></p><p></p><p>In Lily Brown's stunning <em>Blade Work</em>, every line rounds a sharp corner to crash into pleasure. The discoveries made here are those of a mapmaker tracing strange hills and paths laid out in her own hand. And when she finds darkness, it's tempered by the transformative power of attention: "Crushed a dead moth with my sleeve," Brown writes. "Anywhere I lean, wing." These gorgeous and precise poems reassemble the broken vase of language itself.-<strong>Dan Rosenberg</strong></p><p></p><p>"The fence is thinking," "the trees look like legs," "the field is the sea" in lines sharp as a "jagged fragment of slate," Lily Brown seeks to restor