Review by Jami Macarty
In Blade Work, winner of Parlor Press’s New Measure Poetry Prize, Lily Brown writes into palpable presence the space between “Goodbye” and “The Possible.” She achieves this by setting her poems on the “blurred brink” — between dream and waking life, body and realm, memory and the future. The poems flow without sections, enhancing continuity and allowing consciousness to shift and overlap. Through the “aperture” of time, Brown transforms “recollection” into an artistic “estimation of the present.”
Descartes once asked, “How can I know that I am not now dreaming?” This question echoes throughout Blade Work. As Brown similarly explores the reliability of sensory experience and the nature of the external world, she draws attention to the distinction between “what’s in or in front of you,” questioning the very essence of reality.
Within the poems, the speaker frequently awakens from dreams, questioning whether the experiences were “nightmares or reveries, / losses or gifts.” The nature of this inquiry evokes trauma and “grief untwisted.” “These are dark works,” the poet admits, but leaves the reader to ponder what “casts shadows.” The poems gain strength from their ambiguity which underscores the idea that genuine understanding often lies in discerning the “half crafted, / half arranged’ connections that shape our beliefs.
Combined, this ambiguity and quest for the present propel Brown’s approach to craft. In her search for a poetic “valve that lets another consciousness arrive,” Brown’s lines serve as instruments of both excision and concision. Each carefully crafted line is as precise as a knife, an oar, or a pen in motion — distinct acts that mirror the collection’s central tension between a “freezing past” and an uncertain future. Combined with her “jagged” diction and verbs that “judder,” these elements of craft and theme work together to define Lily Brown’s voice “against memory’s airy commerce—” in order to “stay true” to her own “cracked intuition.” After the backstory is “cut / mercifully,” these poems thrumming, winging.
Blade Work by Lily Brown. Parlor Press, January 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
