Wish Ave

Alessandra Lynch, 1965-

Book - 2024

"WISH AVE is a book whose striving is human intimacy--through conversation, through silence, through memory, through loss, through art, through trauma, through nature. The book gives voice to the lack of connection, or confused connection, the lack of touching, closeness, and clarity during the pandemic. WISH AVE is a dream-like narrative that combines three distinctive voices as it simultaneously loses and gains connections to others, plants, places, memories, and beyond. Memories are reanimated, reassessed, and re-envisioned. Voices carry the history of a life, the lives of those they've lived with, known, encountered, interacted with. The two voices and the speaker's voice carry the poems that cross time, relationships, bo...undaries between life and death. The voices create deep portraits of mentors, family members, and friends. Loneliness, tragedy, art, death, music, communion, connection, and consolation are all found here. These highly lyric poems have big emotional stakes. There is palpable intensity, almost like the book is vibrating with trepidation, sorrow, fear, love, vibrancy, and uncertainty. The poems move water-like through visions and memory, personal myth, and prophecy. They don't feel beholden to expectations but free and insistent upon existing in their own space, on their own terms. There is a lot of risk in these poems, and the reward is in the connections and space between them"-- more