[10/22/24] Lynch, Alessandra: Wish Ave

Alice James Books, paperback

Publication Date: October 22, 2024

Publisher Marketing: “A key to this simmering, unblinking cautionary work is offered in the quiet line: ‘Why has nobody taken care?’ It may be that poetry itself is always taking care, filling with care the world we inherit. The essential dialogic nature of this book (‘who is that sound?/what is the wound?’) establishes the voices in this head, headlong encounter with the world, answering for our human failure to care properly or enough or in time. There is a grandeur about such a style and project that might remind us of the Brownings, both Robert and Elizabeth. The speaker and voices carrying across and through, answers and questions in various orders, the birdfeet and human bodies, burning forests, more questions and one Michiko who leaves at the beginning but is never gone and then returns, like the book itself once it enters the reader’s mind. It is as though Wish Ave is the response to the bird in Eliot’s first quartet, about just how much reality humans can bear. Alessandra Lynch has written beyond the moment, and deeply of the moment, a form of salvation we must all hope to earn.”
—Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth