Lucky Fish

Author: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Publisher: Tupelo Press (2011)

Lucky Fish travels along a lush current—a confluence of leaping vocabulary and startling formal variety, with upwelling gratitude at its source: for love, motherhood, "new hope," and the fluid and rich possibilities of words themselves. With an exuberant appetite for "my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew," anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet's third collection of poems is her strongest yet.

"Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest collection of fanciful and carefully wrought poems are once again far-reaching in geographic scope and linguistic imagination. Here is a poet willing to praise the earth, the animals, the ’mud and its confusion,’ as well as the human ’sleep-sloppy mouths.’ These are sensual dreamscapes of allegory and fable, but with a righteous bite and the razor sting of perception, Lucky Fish is alive with the poet writing well and passionately in a world she cares deeply about."

–Dorianne Laux