Kimberly Lyons

The Practice of Residue Kimberly Lyons

Poetry. Kimberly Lyons wants to 'stay with the poem in this uncomfortable singular place / Where the flies and moths co-exist.' It is hard to listen when 'The poems says: / You can't have any lobster, you stupid, hungry poet.' But that is exactly what the poet does. Instead of shutting the world out, she follows the sounds wherever they take her. 'I abide / one who abets / a lady's maid.' It makes for an intricate music, a teasing out of possibilities. These are the poet's 'restorative analects.' This is a book to read again and again.--John Yau

Kimberly Lyons cracks open the primordial egg from which all creation originates. What issues from it: 'glossy first milk / of time, ' an 'aromatic hem, ' 'the discharging thread, ' 'a / kind of channel / a crystal / edge of the knife, ' 'a stich of blue / for heating flame.' Lyons's absolutely magical reckoning with the world is as generative and hallucinatory as it is generous and honest. Thus THE PRACTICE OF RESIDUE pours out from its mythic eggshell the lost traces of amniotic fluid that every reader needs if she is to realize and be realized: divination becomes 'a binding condensation.' The only possible response to this poetry is gratitude and love.--Elizabeth Robinson