The Solace Is Not the Lullaby

Author: Jill Osier

Publisher: Yale University Press (2020)

The hollow more than shape is certain. The 114th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets features Jill Osier’s poems of quiet attention to the human and natural worlds. Series judge and critically acclaimed poet Carl Phillips notes, “Osier’s is a sensibility unlike any I’ve encountered before—the poems here are thrilling, and strangely new.” In his foreword to the collection, Phillips writes, “Certain mysteries—most of them—remain mysteries in an Osier poem.” Despite this, Osier’s poetry—distinguished by its brevity, precision, and restraint—offers what Phillips describes as feeling “incongruously (dare I say magically?) like closure, a steady place to land.”

“Stunning.”

–Kimberly Burwick

“[A] model of clarity and of the powers of brevity, as well as, more subtly, a quiet but no less persuasive interrogation of what we mean, anymore by words like ‘knowing,’ ‘confession,’ ‘story,’ maybe even ‘poetry’ itself.”

–Carl Phillips