Quiet Lightning is pleased to host a virtual event with Omnidawn Publishing for their seasonal launch of new titles, for which each author will be reading from their work. Hosted by QL director Evan Karp. Be the first to own these new treasures:

Apprentice to a Breathing Hand by Laynie Browne

Alibi Lullaby by Norma Cole

Inventorys by Sam Creely

Hover by Liza Flum

Naomie Anomie: A Biography of Infinite Desire by Jennifer Hasegawa

Bloodletting by Kimberley Reyes

Clay: Bodies + Matter by Martha Ronk

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

About Apprentice to a Breathing Hand by Laynie Browne

The poetry of Laynie Browne’s Apprentice to a Breathing Hand explores alchemy, connectivity, and perception. Throughout the collection, Browne considers the formation and limits of personhood, the experience of a body moving through time, and the imperative to continually learn and unlearn. Browne looks to alchemy as a practice for cultivating the impossible, positioning it as a fitting model for our current moment. In the material of language, meaning must be unmade and remade endlessly, and in this continual regeneration, Browne considers the alchemy of how a poem can in turn transform the poet. Moving through methods of making and unmaking, the collection centers on the figure of an apprentice working in a space of indeterminacy, lack, breath, and constant shifting.

Laynie Browne is the author of seventeen collections of poems, three novels, and a book of short fiction. Her recent books of poetry include Intaglio Daughters, Practice Has No Sequel, Letters Inscribed in Snow, and Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists. She coedited I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women and edited A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel. Her work has appeared in publications including Conjunctions, A Public Space, New American Writing, BrooklynRail, and in anthologies including The Ecopoetry Anthology, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Honors include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award. She teaches creative writing and coordinates the MOOC Modern Poetry at the University of Pennsylvania.

To have Apprentice to a Breathing Hand sent to your door, order here.

About Alibi Lullaby by Norma Cole

Alibi, in Latin, meant “elsewhere,” and “lullaby”—from lull, to soothe, and bye, near, close by—has elements linguistic elements that appear across cultures. Music, from ancient songs recorded on tables to contemporary compositions, share related framing elements that have persisted across time: formal patterns and rhythms, peaceful and hypnotic movements, and elements of terror arising from the moving frontier of “thrill, dread, certainty.”

In this collection, Norma Cole considers the ancient and transcendent patterns of music, finding them through nature, heart sounds, the spectral elegance of blood flow, the murmur of melody, and many diverse patterns and beats. Sounds of summer, massacres, “empathy through distress,” unknowing, energy, suspense, and fragility echo throughout the poems and other writings. Drawing on a poetics that embraces formal freefall and looks forward while holding up the shifting mirror of memory, Alibi Lullaby is a lyrical montage at the edges of musicality.

Norma Cole is the author of poetry books including Fate News, Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, Where Shadows Will, Collective Memory, Spinoza in Her Youth, and Actualities, a collaboration with painter Marina Adams. Her translations from French include works by Danielle Collobert and Jean Daive. Cole has published poems in literary magazines including Gramma, Posit, BrooklynRail, Art in America, Hambone, Sulfur, and Conjunctions, and in anthologies such as American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry and Best American Experimental Writing. Cole was born in Toronto, Canada, and she lives in San Francisco.

To have Alibi Lullaby sent to your door, order here.

About Inventorys by Sam Creely

In this work of hybrid historiography, Sam Creely modulates the English sentence to map the ways anglophone imperial self-fashioning moves in and out of social coherence, investigating how syntactic requirements reflect colonial history and how the rules of language structure thought. Through scenes including intimate encounters with dye, fabric, and garments, Creely reveals the sexual and racial grammars of empire.

Inventorys takes as its point of departure the voyage, shipwreck, and eventual excavation of the Spanish trade vessel El Nuevo Constante. Animated by the image of sixty thousand pounds of dye bleeding into the Gulf of Mexico, this six-part poetic documentation follows the wreckage of the Constante linguistically, moving among early modern lexicography, and ultimately toward enmeshed histories of catalog, fabrication, and revision.

Inventorys is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn Poetry Open Book Contest, selected by Shane McCrae.

Sam Creely is assistant professor at ArtCenter College of Design. With Pia Sazani, they are a founding editor of the DanceNotes Chaplet Series and coauthor of Throat Draw Come Out With It. Inventorys is their debut poetry collection.

To have Inventorys sent to your door, order here.

About Hover by Liza Flum

Liza Flum’s Hover focuses on queer polyamorous families, considering the ways people in radical family structures are both highly visible and erased. From hummingbirds to stars, historical records, and cemetery monuments, Flum searches for images to represent lives and loves like her own and to find lasting traces of queer and chosen family. In the poetic lexicon of Hover, hummingbirds become emblems of ungraspable survival and vitality, while records on paper and in stone afford enduring, though limited, representations.

The book explores sexuality, love, reproductive choice, and infertility in sonnets and expansive prose meditations. Linked stanzas, which act as little rooms, suggest the intermingling of bedrooms, doctor’s offices, and hospital rooms. The many forms in this collection claim space, both on the page and in poetic discourse, to make the intimate outwardly visible.

Liza Flum is a poet and teacher. Her poems have appeared in journals including AGNI, Narrative, Poet Lore, and Washington Square Review. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, and her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Saltonstall Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Summer Words, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She lives with her family in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

To have Hover sent to your door, order here.

About Naomie Anomie: A Biography of Infinite Desire by Jennifer Hasegawa

Jennifer Hasegawa’s NAOMIE ANOMIE: A Biography of Infinite Desire, is an experimental poetic take on biography, growing increasingly surreal as it follows the truths behind its unreliable narrator through paradoxes rendered in luxurious detail. This book is a portrait of a flawed life, a call for attention to the looming ecological crisis, and a lyrical experiment in truth-telling.

Feeling ever-increasing existential strain leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and culminating in her decision to no longer venture outside of her apartment, Naomie is not surprised to find her name is an anagram for anomie, a term for the breakdown of social norms. In these pages is a meticulous account of everything that went wrong in Naomie’s five decades of life. We find retellings of a life’s most significant moments—not because they are sources of pride, but because they stand as the only decipherable moments of humanity amid a world of static. This story in verse acts as a survival guide, romance novel, liberation handbook, pulp thriller, and jokebook for those who will live through ongoing plagues, environmental change, total AI integration, water wars, and cyberattacks and who will come out the other side ready to restart.

Jennifer Hasegawa is the author of La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, which was longlisted for The Believer Book Award for Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in the Adroit Journal, Bamboo Ridge, Bennington Review, jubilat, Tule Review, and Vallum. She is the founder of the Kau Kau Chronicles (kaukauchronicles.org), a website dedicated to preserving and sharing recipes from out-of-print cookbooks published by Hawai’i community organizations from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century. Hasegawa is a third-generation Japanese American, born and raised on the Big Island of Hawai’i, and she currently lives in San Francisco.

To have Naomie Anomie to your door, order here.

About Bloodletting by Kimberly Reyes

This is a collection of poems about how we find and cultivate love amid wars, including wars that often go ignored. Throughout Bloodletting, Kimberly Reyes considers how we define love and who gets to experience it, paying special attention to the ways that race and sex influence how we are perceived and valued by society. Through the voice of a Black woman coming to terms with her own perspectives on relationship-building, Reyes shows the damage that contemporary culture can do to women, and Black women in particular. Resisting passivity, Reyes’s poetry cuts through pervasive doom scrolling, virtue signaling, and parasocial relationships, inviting readers to remember what care is really supposed to feel like.

Kimberly Reyes is a poet, essayist, and the author of the poetry collections vanishing point. and Running to Stand Still. Her book of essays Life During Wartime won the 2018 Michael Rubin Book Award. Her work has been published in various outlets including the Atlantic, New York Times, New York Post, Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, Village Voice, ESPN the Magazine, Irish Examiner, Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland, and Best American Poetry Blog. Reyes is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

To have Bloodletting sent to your door, order here.

About Clay: Bodies + Matter by Martha Ronk

The poems in Clay look to the process of forming clay on a potter’s wheel to examine our sense of touch and texture, emptiness, fragility, and the nature of time. Martha Ronk moves through the steps of creating a pot that must be formed, dried, bisque-fired, glazed, and fired again. This practice is paralleled in Ronk’s process-oriented language that addresses how we read texture and color, the ways history and landscapes appear in glazes, Mimbres bowls that covered the faces of the dead, and Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings of ceramic forms.

For Ronk, pottery raises questions about the value of repetition, inevitable failure, and how we may become one with matter. As the potter’s hands ache and age, the bowl seems to age as it slumps or breaks. Clay includes observations from other potters and writers as well as small photographs of pots.

To have Clay: Bodies + Matter sent to your door, order here.

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This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Authors and books are pictured above as listed, clockwise from top left.

Background image is of China Camp State Park, the venue for Quiet Lightning's event Poetry in Parks in 2024 and 2025 (details to be announced soon). Photo by Evan Karp.