Lambflesh

Caroline Shea'sLambflesh crackles with stark and magic-stung survival songs, asks 'what bloom or blight / will make a home in me, ' asks what balm or gauze or "scavenged relics" for trauma, for generational ailments, for pain and its haunted memory seeping through the blood. These poems are dark and potent and myth-heavy; they unbandage the stigma from mental health issues and sing "as refusal of erasure."

Jenn Givhan, i>Girl with Death Mask and Rosa's Einstein

"Unstitch me and wear me as a pelt, a blood-and-guts ball gown," writes the speaker of Caroline Shea's Lambflesh, an invitation charged with ruthless longing, mixing violence and horror with the intoxicating language of desire. The body depicted in these poems is "always / a negotiation," at once a stranger "Zoo of lung and stubborn tissue" and a dear familiar friend "Oh, you old girl / you unthanked junk." The speaker meditates on these twin feelings of belonging and estrangement-"when you see the creature / wearing your old skin // you will know her"-and marvels at the newness of this body in recovery "What is it-to look / in the mirror, turning and turning and think, finally, / I could live here, yes-I live here." The collection's rich tonal complexity and gorgeous attention to language contribute to its extraordinary rendering of self-discovery.

Emily Skaja, Brute

I confess: I am drawn to poems that break me into a tenderness I'd never known. Caroline Shea's Lambflesh does it over and over. Here is a new voice, verdant with longing, humming "the lovely machinery" of her body, "bending towards light."

Major Jackson, Roll Deep and The Absurd Man: Poems