new from above/ground press: I Have Not Led a Serious Life, by Lydia Unsworth

I Have Not Led a Serious Life
Lydia Unsworth
$5

’tempting

I want to make something more gentle than someone like me is capable of making. If I curl up on the tapijt and press my bones against skin, can I make a shell emerge? Can I think marble configurations into keratin and harden? It appears. The thing. Pushed from my ribs. A pea pressed through a slippery morsel of conduit. An egg dropped onto a cloud from a kittiwake in headwind. A shower of benedict. Oily palms. The egg is caught and caught and caught and. A delight. We whip the cream and then we eat it. We step back in sync―a dance, a masquerade―and that tiny silent offering passes hands, soars, is surreptitiously scrambled.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
October 2019
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Lydia Unsworth is the author of two collections of poetry: Certain Manoeuvres (Knives Forks & Spoons, 2018) and Nostalgia for Bodies (Winner, 2018 Erbacce Poetry Prize), and one previous chapbook, My Body in a Country (Ghost City Press). Recent work can be found in Ambit, Litro, para.text, Tears in the Fence, Banshee, Ink Sweat and Tears, Train and others. Manchester / Amsterdam. Twitter @lydiowanie.

Cover image: Stuart Buck, "Still Life #4"

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