Blade Work

<h3>Winner of the New Measures Poetry Prize</h3><p>Free Verse Editions</p><p></p><h2>What People Are Saying</h2><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 restore things to their thingness-to see things as they are often by seeing them as they are not. To seal out emotion to let the world make her instead of the other way around. Through Brown's eyes the world becomes itself again-vivid radiant unknowable.-<strong>Emma Winsor Wood</strong></p><p></p><p>As AI-powered media mirrors chart a billion blinks scan each eye for its next fear its secret desire as power fans out in a zillion-swarm of amoeba drones the poems in Lily Brown's Blade Work turn our eyes to other and othered elements: sky cloud wind river dream. Here sets a semi-automatic sun there a building's touch gives the wind its pitch. Like a valve that lets another consciousness arrive Blade Work taunts the looming world by turning away thumbs its nose to annihilation's head fakes its con-job hypnotist's claim to our attention. Instead since the answer it turns out is an abyss these scalpeled and sculpted poems address power's truer signatures by folding Bishop Stein and Stevens into new prescriptions for feeling what we see. The clarity here hovers inside a spiritual crisis locked inside global material catastrophe; the authority claims even flaunts an impossibility of achieved precision like glass bent in a storm/of sun. -<strong>Ed Pavli��</strong></p><p></p><h2>About the Author</h2><p>Lily Brown is the author of <em>Rust or Go Missing </em>and several chapbooks including <em>The Haptic Cold</em>. In addition to the New Measure Poetry Prize she has won the Poetry Society of America's Cecil Hemley Memorial Award and has been awarded residencies at Arte Studio Ginistrelle the Vermont Studio Center and the UCross Foundation.</p><p></p>