Imago

by Lindsay Lusby

This first chapbook from Lindsay Lusby is a poem series chronicling the coming-of-age fairy tale of a girl and an eggplant.

You can find a copy here: https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/prod...

Lindsay Lusby is the author of the chapbook Imago (dancing girl press, 2014) and winner of the 2015 Fairy Tale Review Award in Poetry, judged by Joyelle McSweeney. Her poems have appeared most recently in North Dakota Quarterly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Third Point Press, Sugar House Review, The Lumberyard, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. With Jehanne Dubrow, she has co-edited two poetry anthologies from the Literary House Press: The Book of Scented Things (2014) and Still Life with Poem (2016). She is the Assistant Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College, where she serves as assistant editor for the Literary House Press and managing editor for Cherry Tree. www.lindsaylusby.com

Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Lindsay Lusby is the author of the poetry collection Catechesis: a postpastoral (The University of Utah Press, 2019), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, judged by Kimiko Hahn. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Blackbird Whitetail Redhand (Porkbelly Press, 2018) and Imago (dancing girl press, 2014), and the winner of the 2015 Fairy Tale Review Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared most recently in Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, The Account, and North Dakota Quarterly. Her visual poems have appeared in Dream Pop Press and Duende. She is a Senior Poetry Reader for Cherry Tree and she edits poems at Tell Tell Poetry.

Reviews

[Tia M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely beautiful.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love how in this chapbook, Lusby takes an unlikely (to say the least!) relationship between a girl and and eggplant and makes it so wonderfully, strangely moving. The eggplant's relationship to the girl's absent mother is the source of the poems' emotional power--and the pop culture/reverse-Persephone imagery for the missing mother does careful work to lay the foundation here: "She was last seen in her favorite red shoes/dancing her fertility dance by the jukebox."... "Leave the eggplant,//take the pomegranate./ Leave the girl,//take the shoes." I love how the bond forms between girl and eggplant--the colorful and surprising things they teach each other--about winter, the afterlife, and the Titanic (which "is called maiden/ but it is not.//It is full and heavy and sinks.") There are a few moments of humor that seem a like unnecessary distractions, but overall the poems gather momentum and move towards a metamorphosis at the end which...well, I won't spoil it, but I'll say, it works, and it's powerful. The final poem is the strongest, and "the afterbirth is light." Recommended.