Heat, Sob, Lily

Heat, Sob, Lily, Andersson Bicher’s second poetry collection, takes as its subject the full range of human experience. Embodying the sentiment of Zorba the Greek- 'like everyone else before me, I fell headlong into the ditch'-the book considers both how to get out and the beauty and truth of the ditch itself. The poems vary from spare and compressed to longer narrative and lyrical work. Sometimes cast in first-person and sometimes voiced by a persona, Andersson Bicher’s poems are animated by an inventive use of language, rhythm, imagery and enjambment. There’s furious beauty and inventive, hard-driving music ('not always blossom- sweet but breathbrute') to be found in Heat, Sob, Lily.... brings to mind the light- ning-fierce, self-mythologizing Sylvia Plath of 'Lady Lazarus' and the on-fire early poems of Margaret Atwood, but Andersson Bicher is indeed her own resilient, X-ray engineer and lucid magician of 21st-century truthtelling.... -Cyrus Cassells, author of Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? ... ever since reading Kristina Andersson Bicher’s Heat, Sob, Lily, I keep expecting the world around me to klaxon, to become more exciting, scary and vibrant.... impressionistic, musical poems ... hope and harrow and 'say wild wooded / things rattling the leaf bin.' ... arriving, gloriously, to utter 'there should be snow bees... that come out in winter, only.' So stop reading this blurb, 'put down / your fruit glosses and curling wands, pick up that pipe wrench' and read poems that staple their kisses upon you, while they light 'the petite torches / to see where the wind comes from.' ... a profound, dazzling and powerful book. -Christopher Citro, author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun ... This is a book full of falls and slides: a set of keys into snow, a dog into a base- ment, the infant Jesus from heaven, and, of course, from innocence into experi- ence. The poems possess startling candor and enormous subtlety. Finally we are told'Iwillnot giveuponyouonyouIwillnot/giveuponyou anditwasa voice I had never / heard.' This voice is the mother to the child, the Divine to the speaker, any of us to ourselves. -Kathleen Ossip, author of July