A Princess Magic Presto Spell (Second Edition)

Author: Lisa Jarnot

Publisher: Flood Editions (2019)

Lisa Jarnot began A Princess Magic Presto Spell after the birth of her daughter, setting the modest goal of writing three words a day.2 Now a decade-long work-in-progress, these fragments of language are collected into a shorthand chronicle of family life that is intimate and yet open to all the world. Full of nimble transitions and non sequiturs, the poem captures the harrowing joys of parenthood alongside "funerals, dentists, divorces," in a give and take between the routine and the extraordinary.

"Lisa Jarnot writes the meter of everything in A Princess Magic Presto Spell. As she does this, she reminds us what matters. In case you don't know, it is the small animals and the plum trees and the mothers of friends and the moon and her dreams. This book is funny and yet also is an elegy. I read it. And then I read it several more times because I didn't want it to end. It is that lovely."

–Juliana Spahr