Lloyd, Christina: Women Twice Removed

"There is a powerful sense of ekphrasis in Christina Lloyd's poems. They interrogate representations of women through media as diverse as painting, sculpture, ultrasound images and the CT scans of an ancient mummy. Here is a concentrated, sometimes forensic, female gaze and voice at work. Each poem is an act of poiesis that searches and simultaneously conflates the boundaries of the actual and the imaginary. Her work commemorates and invokes, disclosing the multi-dimensional dynamic of the human sphere.

These poems are both immediate and complex: acts of linguistic formulation that are sensuous, precise, rich in cultural traces, locations and forms of experience. They bring into play an invigorated sense of culture in which to be human is to interact with an evanescent present moment that encapsulates history, memory, future and art itself. Images cascade within apparently orderly poetic forms that seethe with restless energy and an acute consciousness. These synergies establish Lloyd as an original poet, a multivalent sensibility, an urgent voice that commands attention."

—Graham Mort, author of Like Fado and Other Stories and Black Shiver Moss

Born in Hong Kong and raised in Manila and San Francisco, Christina Lloyd holds a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University. Her work appears in a wide variety of journals, including Canadian Woman Studies, Hive, Meniscus, Poetry Daily, Poetry Ireland, Poet Lore, and The North. Her debut collection, Women Twice Removed, is published by Sixteen Rivers Press. She lives in San Francisco.

"In Women Twice Removed, Christina Lloyd unveils an inventive and incisive ekphrasis. Her Lorca-like eye moves from canvases by Spanish artists such as Zurbarán, Varo, Velázquez, and Goya, to the life and work of her grandmother (herself a sculptor), to landscapes of California and Spain, to the most elusive subject of all—the self. Lloyd's poems are personal without being solipsistic, hopeful but not glib, mournful but never nihilistic.I admire how Lloyd is willing to name and feel profound loss while simultaneously celebrating the crushing contours of life. Rita Dove notes correctly that poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful, two adjectives that perfectly describe this collection. I don't know how Dove presaged the masterpiece that is Women Twice Removed, but I am grateful for both miracles. I love this book." — Dean Rader, Author of Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly

"In this haunting and extraordinary collection, we experience the search for a true ancestral home. Where does the speaker end and the (grandm)other begin? Which is the language of connection, and which of separation? From squid ink to paintings to sculptures to mummies to family portraits, these poems navigate the tensions and energies that exist across cultures and through deep time. With a deftness and specificity that is both gorgeous and arresting, they sing out over a familiar meadow, inviting us to remember our own versions of a finger cut so deep // it became a gill Women Twice Removed is an elegant, unsettling book." — Caroline Goodwin, Author of Madrigals and Old Snow, White Sun

"Christina Lloyd's poetry, in Women Twice Removed, is intense and tautly eloquent. The poems are prominently tethered to Lloyd's grandmother, Esperanza, whose name means hope, and who journeyed from Spain to the Philippines and on to California. Life, it is said, begins with a stumble, and so here begins the life of these arresting poems, which delve into what Christina and her grandmother experienced along the way. Lloyd's poetry is like a tree that is well rooted and stands tall. Her poems speak quietly; her images are paintings. Read these poems slowly, and take the time to reflect, to savor each line, and to believe in hope." — Joe Zaccardi, Author of Like Fado and Other Stories and Black Shiver Moss