Lambright, Kimberly: Doom Glove

PRROBLEM, paperback

Publication Date: September 16, 2024

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Kimberly Lambright is a poet for whom impression is currency and mood is form. Doom Glove, Lambright's second collection, works with the lyric just as much as against it. These poems are, by turns, surrealist, riotous, and sincere—the confessional past inside the tonal present. Like us, they "lug their own myth to the party." What's at stake in Doom Glove is possibility itself: the unlikely—"out here in the gosh"—becomes not only likely but necessary. If this be doom, one size fits all.

To put on the doom glove is to touch the world with fingers dipped in truth serum. At your own risk, allow this collection of lyrically taut poems to shuffle you through paradoxes. Binding oaths are more fragile than casual encounters; Living things are more potent reminders of death than plastic; Cities are refuges from nature as much as they’re prisons for human animals. I barely exhaled as I read Doom Glove by Kimberly Lambright. These poems hold the reader in bursting suspension. —Monica McClure, author of The Gone Thing and Tender Data

“Reader, are you bittersweet?” Kimberly Lambright asks in Doom Glove. I enthusiastically say “yes!” Lambright’s poems show me to be bittersweet is to be in a state of excitation, of feeling—not infirm—but firmly fraught in a way that’s alluring, even existentially illuminating. Lambright practices a surreal, yet psychically dense poetics; her poems’ “series of misnomers” present a new rubric of feeling through image, allowing me access to the poet’s many moods I try on as a glove. In this, I am doomed to feel, yet guided to become an observer of the self by a fellow sojourner in “slushlove” who assures me, “I am here for you as I’ve always been.” —Ruth Williams, author of Flatlands and Nursewifery

To create a self, a form, from words and memory. To inhabit the absurdity of others and cities and time. To hold images and confession, doom and hope, in the same hand. The unapologetic poems in Kimberly Lambright’s Doom Glove do all of this and more. —Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, author of Basic Needs and Images for Radical Poetics

Doom Glove is a study in girlhood that is perverted, twisted, reworked. It offers a synesthetic language that is not at all synthetic. In fact, it’s the opposite—through a cacophony of images, these poems explore deeper truths about the self as female anti-hero—both “the party" and "the quiet room in the party.” Be prepared for roses that laugh up, pudding that won’t feed you, and scents that dig into the skin. Be prepared most of all to examine the darker sides of desire, damage, intimacy, and rage—the power of writing to invite something in, and then send it out again. —Sara Deniz Akant, author of Hyperphantasia and Babette

In Kimberly Lambright’s deeply personal, playful collection Doom Glove, she sweeps up the seemingly scattered pieces of her life—“I’m crying again over my powers of description”—and arranges them into brilliant self-inquiring poems that invite us in. Lambright’s reach into the word bag strikes us to play and create, in order to mend our tiny stupid hearts. —Paige Taggart, author of Want For Lion and Or Replica

The poems in Kimberly Lambright’s second collection, Doom Glove, luxuriate in a wisened desire for juvenescence with restless patience, knowing she can aim where she pleases the glint that makes anything glitter. Notice the dolly zoom effect of “At first it was easy to like experience”—a deceptively simple line that ensnares the reader in a double reckoning while Lambright reclines, content, just out of the frame she’s created. This slippage is abundant with a longing satisfied, and satisfying, in its firm evasion of finality, the romance of impossibility: “Growth is just to finish / and who wants to be done?” Put on Doom Glove to better grasp that language is where fate’s aura falters exquisitely. —Logan Fry, author of Harpo Before the Opus

Reading Kimberly Lambright’s Doom Glove is like attending an endless buffet of snacks and sweets, where the technicolor fruits are strikingly shiny, yet you trust they’re organic. It’s like playing a video game where the heroine, equipped with glitch-proof magic adventures through relationships and dimensions, and eats colors that bleed and bend, on her quest to find doom’s antidote. Grounded in belief and desire, this collection is a breaking open, a turning over, an upheaval of the ordinary and the known. —Emily Brandt, author of Falsehood

With its collage-like abstractions and atmospheric sense of crooked dread, Doom Glove is like nothing else. The array of ludicrous imagery felt intoxicating and inspiring to me. I frequently gasped as I read and re-read Kimberly Lambright’s nimble deconstructions. As she writes in one poem, “Unpredictability isn’t cruelty./All these comebacks and discoveries.” What a thrill these words are! —Kevin Sampsell, author of I Made an Accident: Collages and Poems

Kimberly Lambright’s Doom Glove is a leap forward from her earlier quite stunning work, its hardened syntax and abrupt compressions and turns of phrase shower the reader with emotional and intellectual sparks that are both disorienting and thrilling in their originality and reach. Particularly daring work is often described as “edgy,” but Lambright’s new poems offer the reader multiple edges at once, and ask us to either choose or deal with the multiplicities. The book is a fresh, beautifully tuned experience no poetry lover should be without. —Christopher Howell, author of The Grief of a Happy Life