A Window That Can Neither Open Nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance

(Paperback)

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An intimate and kaleidoscopic entry in the Multiverse series that excavates survival, storytelling, and coming to terms with an unrulymind.

InA Window That Can Neither Open nor Close, the stakes of writing are also the stakes of living. Though I no longer wanted to die, writes Lauren Russell, our first years together were not easy because I also did not want to live. From this enigmatic in-between, Russell dives into multitudes: cats and questions; compulsion and devotion; narrative and diagnosis; language and loneliness; scrupulosity and stasis; suicidality andlove.

Resisting the neurotypical expectation to choose any one answer arising from her explorations, she invites readers to engage: a pop quiz, a twelve-sided die, an abecedarian confession, a box of mirrors, several idiosyncratic diagnostic tools, and a suite of obsidian waiting rooms. Holding binaries in suspense, Russell seamlessly unfolds and enfolds the various operations of language, moving through forms with the restless brilliance of an architect turned ethicist turned collagist turned origamist. And everything, it seems, finds some way to turn back intopoetry.

From psychological evaluation to clickbait, Russell transforms the worlds furious search for explanations into open inquiry. How flat is the silence in your pocket she asks. Is the inside of a wish an ossuary Do questions stick you to the wall of sociability Did I say I am making my own bestiary What kind of cascade is this In a book dedicated to knowing, to not-knowing, and to its readers, Russell pulls back the curtain and invites usin.

Reviews

Praise for Descent

As a poet, Russell is a collector and a seamstress. She fashions not a quilt but a technicolor raincoat. As a sound sculptor, Russell builds in rotations of oration like church or Harryette Mullen, playful and searing in her way.RHINO

A triumph of art and honesty that only comes from the devotion to and exploration of ones own wounds.The Rumpus

Russell raises the stakes and shows her mettle. The crafting of the tale is as much about what Lorde has given Russell as it is about what Russell does with the inherited. The result is a poetic, hybrid tour de force that delivers not only the assembled narrative, but accounts of creating the book itself.Yona Harvey, author of Hemming the Water

In this haunting, meticulously-crafted book of documentary poetry, Lauren Russell sifts through the tangled materials of history to make space for reimagined ancestral voices, including that of her enslaved great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert. Russell is a virtuoso of poetic form, and this book emerges as a radiant collage of prose poetry, lyric fragments, confessions, erasures, photographs, and images of the documents (including the diary of Robert Wallace Hubert, Peggy's enslaver and the father of her children), which form the basis of her research.Descentasks important questions about what we know and how to hold it: "I do not know the tune, but I will hum / it for you.Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

In Descent, the very talented poet Lauren Russell shows us how to write what we do not know; to give with grace and dignity, humanity to names on the family tree. Descent is a search for truths felt in ones bones.Brenda Coultas, author of The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations

An audacious, acid, lyrical re-membering that asks, what do we demand of the past, and what to do with its refusal Russells deep archive would not answer her back. With Descent, however, she speaks to us. Sit all the way down and listen up.Douglas Kearney, author of Sho: Poems

Lauren Russells stellar new book-length poem [. . .] portrays a rich, Black American ancestral record. Sifting nimbly through all manner of documentation and employing form in revelatory ways, Russells poems are as much ascent into a present shaped by the past as descent from Americas true heroic figures.John Keene, author of Punks: New Selected Poems

Praise for Whats Hanging on the Hush

Russell debuts with a collection of sardonic splendor, subversive enlightenment, and remarkable observation about mental illness, ignorance, and the minute interactions that reveal the subtleties of human nature. Russells experimental and provocative style beautifully amalgamates traditionally non-poetic structures, arranging it all in a sort of controlled chaos. Among her checklists, definitions, brief narratives, and streams of consciousness, her metafictional pieces warrant the most praise.Publishers Weekly (starred)

Author Bio

Lauren Russellis the author ofA Window That Can Neither Open nor Close;Descent,winner of the Poetry Society of Americas 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; andWhats Hanging on the Hush. Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing,andresidencies from Millay Arts, Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American PoetsPoem-a-Day,theNew York Times Magazine,Brooklyn Rail,and elsewhere.She is an assistant professor inthe Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and lives in Baltimore with her cats, Cat Jeoffry and Lady Day.