Tunnel by Lisa Furmanski – NWVS #176

This brilliant first collection channels the she-wolf self; the female snapping-turtle self; even, at a volcano’s mouth, the teetering human self while its lying simulacrum, the secure selfie, hides all precarity. Just as movie-goers might imagine themselves being Princess Leia upon seeing Star Wars, these knife-edged musical poems, sharp with lament and anger, make me imagine my own voice, like that of Tunnel, might bring to all my best and fiercest self.

–Susan Wheeler, Professor of Creative Writing, Princeton University

If the question governing these sometimes harrowing, brilliant poems is, “What is joy?” the answer must be found in the paradox of tunnels, in dark enclosures underground, in the graves of buried girls, in cupboards, down wells, in a turtle’s glass bowl, a she wolf’s hunger, and a garage that might harbor a gun. Both a coming-of-age story and a journey through the tunnel of wingless motherhood and numbing winter depression, these moving poems evoke a primal archaeology of female need, isolation, and ecstatic, finally freeing shapeshifting in language that wrings its pungent imagery from a nature redolent with emblems.

–Ivy Schweitzer, Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, Dartmouth College