Swallower
Lyric Hunter
February 2014
A true wonder.
Lewis Warsh
Swallower explores spaces in between lost and found, present and historic, public and private. Opening at the Gare de Lyon, a point of both arrival and departure, the poems move through and around Paris, the Cevennes, and Nantes. Along these routes, simple objects—textures, colors, shards of language—are encountered by a mind that frames them as both marginal and central, detritus and treasure. Acting as triggers to memory and thought, the minutia of everyday life is built into the voice of a shifting and multiple other, an outsider who can only notate in fragments. These are poems of migration, of the stranger in a landscape which morphs as it is being traced. This is Lyric Hunter’s first chapbook of poems.
About the Author
Lyric Hunter’s poems and prose works have appeared in Organism For Poetic Research’s Pelt Vol. 4, and The Felt. She is the author of two chapbooks, Motherwort (Guillotine, 2017) and Swallower (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014). She is a born-and-bred New Yorker. She lives in Houston, Texas.
Praise
Lyric Hunter’s poem unfolds like a litmus test for how much the eye can see. She takes us beyond the barricades, amid “the chalky gout of ruin,” so familiar and foreign, as if she was lighting up the wasteland one last time. Much is at stake here, like getting lost in a maze, and then realizing it doesn’t matter whether you find your way home. Lyric Hunter is the perfect companion and her first book a true wonder.
Lewis Warsh
Lyric Hunter is an exquisite mover. She has invented a foreign tongue of gritty beauty, cut-up and song. She scapes the city while we swallow. This is a début with emphatic boughs.
Sarah Riggs
In Lyric Hunter’s poems, we’re invited to join her between leaps from image to image, in the spaces where recorded thoughts or the stray vernacular phrase find a way to emerge. Sometimes the images—a French landscape or train station or street, a creek or a garden, a broken bell tower or a burning car—are swallowed in the palpable struggle to find language that can do them justice. Place becomes many places, fragmented and re-built until you begin to prefer her version of things to the original.
Tony Iantosca
In the News
Publication Details
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 32 pp, 4.5 x 7.5 in
Publication Date: February 15 2014
Distribution: Direct Only