Blade Work

Lily Brown Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize (Selected by Carl Phillips) Free Verse Editions Edited by Jon Thompson Information and Pricing 978-1-64317-498-3 (paperback, $14.95); 978-1-64317-499-0 (PDF, $9.95); 978-1-64317-500-3 (EPUB, $9.95). © 2025 by Parlor Press, 78 pages. Bookstores: Order by fax, mail, or phone. See our "Sales and Ordering Page" for details. What People Are Saying In the tradition of such poets as Laura Jensen, Jean Valentine, and Saskia Hamilton—yet utterly their own—Lily Brown’s poems spring from ordinary enough spaces—the natural world, domestic life and what goes on there—but as if these were the understory to a vast forest of waking dream, of the “general and particular/rhymed to dream’s interior.” The poems are governed, I would add, by dream’s particular, elusive, strange logic, all the stranger for how persuasive and authoritative it is while refusing to be mapped or, indeed, explained. I trust these poems, as I trust their way of thinking—a way that, by the book’s end, feels like the only way of proceeding: not past mystery, but deeper, into it. —Carl Phillips In Lily Brown’s stunning Blade Work, every line rounds a sharp corner to crash into pleasure. The discoveries made here are those of a mapmaker tracing strange hills and paths laid out in her own hand. And when she finds darkness, it’s tempered by the transformative power of attention: “Crushed a dead moth with my sleeve,” Brown writes. “Anywhere I lean, wing.” These gorgeous and precise poems reassemble the broken vase of language itself. —Dan Rosenberg “The fence is thinking,” “the trees look like legs,” “the field is the sea”: in lines sharp as a “jagged fragment of slate,” Lily Brown seeks to restore things to their thingness—to see things as they are, often by seeing them as they are not. To “seal out emotion” to let the world make her, instead of the other way around. Through Brown’s eyes, the world becomes itself again—vivid, radiant, unknowable. —Emma Winsor Wood As AI-powered media mirrors chart a billion blinks, scan each eye for its next fear, its secret desire, as power fans out in a zillion-swarm of amoeba drones, the poems in Lily Brown’s Blade Work turn our eyes to other and othered elements: sky, cloud, wind, river, dream. Here sets a “semi-automatic sun,” there “a building’s touch gives the wind its pitch.” Like “a valve that lets another consciousness arrive,” Blade Work taunts the looming world by turning away, thumbs its nose to annihilation’s head fakes, its con-job hypnotist’s claim to our attention. Instead, since the “answer, it turns out, is an abyss,” these scalpeled and sculpted poems address power’s truer signatures by folding Bishop, Stein, and Stevens into new prescriptions for feeling what we see. The clarity here hovers inside a spiritual crisis locked inside global material catastrophe; the authority claims, even flaunts, an impossibility of achieved precision like “glass bent in a storm/of sun.” —Ed Pavlić Description The poems in Blade Work explore the relationship between humans and both the natural and built environments, questioning the violence we do to nature and its creatures, along with the industrial landscapes we traverse in our daily lives. Thinking through our relationship to nature, the poems also wonder how nature relates to us, questioning the power dynamics in this fraught connection. The poems dwell, too, in human relationships—how does one manage and live with vulnerability in relationship to others? How can the imagination and its creations shore us up against the fractures and fissures in our relationships to each other and to the world? Thinking about dreams and memory, the poems explore how our dreams can bring the past into the present and vice versa, and how these negotiations create gaps in our experiences of time. Through all these subjects and explorations, the poems in Blade Work use the poetic line as a vehicle for multiplicity, challenging the reader to engage on multiple levels of language and syntax to find meaning, from the line to the stanza, from the sentence to the individual word. About the Author Lily Brown is the author of Rust or Go Missing (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and several chapbooks, including The Haptic Cold (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, A Public Space, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Lana Turner, Mississippi Review, and Oversound, among others. She has won the Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award and has been awarded residencies at Arte Studio Ginistrelle, the Vermont Studio Center, and the UCross Foundation. She lives in Maine with her family and works as a writing teacher. Photograph of the author by Charlie Black. Used by permission.