Lynnell Edwards

Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop: (Or, What Breaks) Lynnell Edwards

In this exciting new collection of poems, Lynnell Edwards illuminates the "molten potential, scourging fire" of glassblowing at Flame Run Hot Shop in Louisville, Kentucky. "Through empathy and penetrating observation, Edwards goes deep inside the art of glassmaking. What she brings back in the form of poems is fascinating-she has absorbed and passes on to us the jargon of the guild, as well as the cautions and the glories the "kings of the hot shop" encounter on the way to finished creations. It is a small, self enclosed universe, and Edwards its sympathetic cosmologist. As one might expect, those who work with a substance and tools that can reach temperatures of a thousand degrees are practical folk, possessed of a dark sense of humor. Molten glass is pretty, and can look delicious, "like taffy/ pulled by hook and hand." But injury and failure are only a breath away, and Edwards is quick to add, "mind your tongue/ friend, this is nothing/ you want between your teeth." Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop captures this paradox and more, in poems that entertain even as they bring us close to the heat, beauty, and danger of creation." - Jeffrey Skinner