Julie Esther Fisher’s poems and short stories appear or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Waxwing, Chicago Quarterly Review, Radar Poetry, The Citron Review, Prime Number Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, On the Seawall, Sky Island Journal, Litmosphere, Leon Literary Review, Passager’s 2025 Contest Issue, and elsewhere. Winner of several awards, including Grand Prize Recipient of the Stories That Need to be Told Anthology, and Sunspot Lit’s Rigel Award, she has been shortlisted in numerous other contests. A grateful recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, she has received multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations. Her novel in stories, A Pearl Is Just an Accident, is forthcoming from Silent Clamor Press. Raised in London, she holds degrees in fiction writing and counseling psychology. She lives today on conserved land in western Massachusetts.
PRAISE:
Julie Esther Fisher echoes no one; her lines startle and boundaries may only reveal themselves when dissolving. Within a single poem one can move from praise for tree, love, or creature, then swerve within a shadowy surrealism to the un-secreting of trauma: “Is there a chance that an eyelash is still someone?” A discreet post-mortem. There is a cast of elegant iridescence over these poems so that innocence ruptured, any breath of menace or what may pick away at the seams of shame, lift toward the reader with an imperative of hard-earned defiance! And yet the poems of On the Lip of Night have a tensile beauty which draws you in, for there is also affection and praise, humor, wit and the intent surprises of poetry itself!
—Jody (Pamela) Stewart, author of This Momentary World
Transformations eerie and magical occur throughout Julie Esther Fisher’s extraordinary collection of poems, On the Lip of Night. A man becomes an ear, children turn into musical instruments, a sleeper is transformed into a deer. A poem’s speaker changes places with a scarecrow, another asks what am I next to be? Memory itself turns physical and lodges in the body; tides and hemlines rise and fall. The poems’ speakers seek to make sense of a chaotic reality in which parents can turn predatory, where children, defenseless against inexplicable cruelties, plan their escape. Form has become mutable, held together by breath and memory. Only now and then there is something to trust, like the hour of milk / when sweetness / instinctive in both / called lip to dipper / and they tasted brightness. With exact observation and incandescent language the poet follows a flickering trail of images and voices, painful and tender, until she can say, This is my music. / This is exactly how I mean it.
—Martha McCollough, author of Trash Witch and I woke up for this
Julie Esther Fisher’s poems may comprise a ‘small act of redemption,’ but small gestures in On the Lip of Night have looming implications. There are restless memories and unflinching assessments — all bristling with intelligence and, ultimately, full acceptance of the strangeness of experience.
—Ron Slate, author of Joy Ride
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