Hanging the Angels

<p>Following over 50 magazine publications and e-book releases Hanging the Angels is Blake Lynch's first full-length traditionally published poetry collection-a fierce intimate and often darkly funny reckoning with cancer memory loss manhood and the salvations of fatherhood and family. </p><p></p><p>Structured around the imagined body of a wooden angel these poems form a road map through a landscape of hospitals highways motel rooms and ghost towns. From the steel bones of Pittsburgh to the haunted air of New Orleans from broken family lines to the fragile joy of raising a daughter Hanging the Angels pulses with hard-won grace and lyric intensity. Drawing from the confessional tradition Appalachian storytelling and Rust Belt elegy Lynch writes with a voice that is both mythic and deeply personal.</p><p>These are poems that confess cuss and break your heart in the same breath. They drive dark roads sing survival into silence find beauty in ash and sky and whisper what the living do after the storm has passed. The result is an elegy rebuilt in light-an act of memory defiance and love.</p><p></p><p>Tributes include lost friends and mentors a motorcycle-riding cancer survivor who never made it home a daughter who gives the speaker reason to stay and figures like Evelyn Grace and Andy Kaufman. Many poems originally appeared in 2River Commonline Journal Dunes Review King Log Levitate Magazine Lines + Stars PulpMAG Poplorish In the Teeth of the Wind and Turk's Head Review.</p><p></p><p>For readers of Philip Levine Sharon Olds Jack Gilbert or Larry Levis Hanging the Angels is a testament to survival and a reminder that some voices shine brightest after the fire.</p>