Lilith: A Novel in Fragments

by Jennifer K. Dick

Made of gathered dust and the poet’s fine attention, made of making itself, recovered in the marked acts of dreaming and writing, a powerful and transformative feminine figure emerges in Jennifer K. Dick’s latest collection. Bleeding through the veil of ripped wallpaper that haunted Charlotte Perkins Gilman, brilliantly imagined out of stain and shadow into sensual life, this at once contemporary and mythic woman becomes our avatar and intimate: “Lili.” Both an “invitation to see” and, literally, a vision, the result of “rough loving” and splendid—hybrid—writing, Lili is a glorious “cast” (think sculpture, yes, but also outcast and cast of characters, and do keep in mind Mallarmé’s cast of the dice...). Complicating and expanding ideas about identity and femininity, subject and object, novel and verse, Lilith is this poet’s most amazing wager and work. (Laura Mullen)

177 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

About the author

Jennifer K. Dick is an American poet, translator and scholar born in Minnesota, raised in Iowa, and currently living in Mulhouse, France, where she is a professor at the Université de Haute Alsace. She has a PhD from the Université de Paris III: La Sorbonne Nouvelle and an MFA in poetry from Colorado State University. Her poetry belongs to the post-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school, with a strong background in lyric and narrative tradition.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lilith is the story of a woman who is lost, finding freedom and identity through the senses, away from the he, toward the wild, the ink stains, her own marks. With Biblical and mythological references, the incorporation of works of art, wall paper, lines of text by contemporary poets, especially by women and about women, Jennifer K. Dick greatest a gorgeous dream canvas of colour, perfume, texture, motion and emotion. There is a yearning for freedom here that many women will recognize.