Blade Work

Author: Lily Brown

Publisher: Parlor Press (2025)

The poems in Blade Work explore the relationship between humans and both the natural and built environments, questioning the violence we do to nature and its creatures, along with the industrial landscapes we traverse in our daily lives. Thinking through our relationship to nature, the poems also wonder how nature relates to us, questioning the power dynamics in this fraught connection.

The poems dwell, too, in human relationships—how does one manage and live with vulnerability in relationship to others? How can the imagination and its creations shore us up against the fractures and fissures in our relationships to each other and to the world? Thinking about dreams and memory, the poems explore how our dreams can bring the past into the present and vice versa, and how these negotiations create gaps in our experiences of time.

Through all these subjects and explorations, the poems in Blade Work use the poetic line as a vehicle for multiplicity, challenging the reader to engage on multiple levels of language and syntax to find meaning, from the line to the stanza, from the sentence to the individual word.