Alessandra Lynch: Poems from Pretty Tripwire

Date: Friday, June 11, 2021
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: Zoom – RSVP REQUIRED
Cost: Free, or choose Donation

Alessandra Lynch: Poems from Pretty Tripwire
Join Indiana Writers Center for an evening of poetry. Alessandra Lynch presents poems from her latest collection, Pretty Tripwire. A Q&A will follow the reading.

In Lynch’s fourth collection, we carefully navigate the fine line between terror and beauty as we face palpable trauma, heartbreak, and wild astonishment through the raw and personal poems. The genuine, delicate voice works to examine who we are, after everything.

*Purchase your copy of Pretty Tripwire from Irvington Vinyl & Books. Receive 10% off by sending a screenshot (for online orders) of your RSVP confirmation or showing (in-person) your RSVP confirmation at check out. Irvington Vinyl & Books: 9 Johnson Ave, Indianapolis IN 46219, (317) 296-4258, elysia@irvingtonvinylandbooks.com
BIO:

Alessandra Lynch is also the author of Sails the Wind Left Behind and It was a terrible cloud at twilight, and Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. Alessandra was born on the East River and now lives with her husband and sons by a stony creek, two hackberry trees, and a magnolia trio. She teaches in Butler University’s undergraduate and MFA programs.

BLURBS:

“Every line of Alessandra Lynch’s superb Pretty Tripwire is measured by a perilous beauty, catastrophic in its cascade of losses. Each poem—short lyric or long sequence—is a blueprint of residence, ghosted by a troubled father, a ‘daughter I did not have,’ a self ‘grown thin’ in sorrow. In this way it’s a book about the making and unmaking of households as well as poems, a web of kindred relationships with their snares and nests and ‘beds of dirt.’ I realize these households radiate from deep within the acute interior of Lynch’s imagination, but I remain truly haunted by every intimate, actual point of contact—is it tenderness? is it brute force?—in the gardens and doorways of Pretty Tripwire.”

—David Baker

“Pretty Tripwire is mythic in its reiteration of its images, which clang with the authority of archetype. Here we meet wolf, bird, root, bell, legless ballerina, lost child, and a swarm of flowers that are everything but pretty. The speaker sees and sees, but what good is seeing, she asks, if you don’t have a voice for telling? To gain it she must unbolt memory, unearth the root, and encounter the pretty tripwires of the machinery of silence. Lynch’s journey is nothing less than heroic.”

—Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl