“Make me fierce and bright in all my injuries,” the poet prays in this stunningly original collection. But how is recovery possible when the body betrays? Ginna Luck’s poems create an exquisite, painstakingly honest roadmap of one woman’s journey toward self-love, acceptance and healing.
–Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of THE DEAD KID POEMS, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly.
In Everything Has Been Asking For Mercy, we awaken in a dreamscape of language, stretched taut between terrifying abstraction and sober truth-telling. In the poem Recovery, Luck writes, I wanted to close my teeth/ on my continuing discomfort, and again and again, she does, facing pain with eyes open and blood in her mouth, seeking out, and discovering beauty, where beauty shouldn’t be. She writes, The blooming hot geraniums, the bees in your/ throat and the small, terrible noises stuck in your fists are feather light, and later on, If you listen closely you’ll hear the slow sinking moon and all the dead light ready to/ disappear. I will disappear. I will die and be reborn a tree. In these poems, Luck proposes that if we’re willing to stare down, and through, the darkness, we will find inside it, wonderment.
–Ben Clark– author of if you turn around I will turn around, and Reasons to Leave the Slaughter
Everything Has Been Asking for Mercy is a trauma narrative. The speaker unflinchingly portrays her illness – “the dead thing inside me” – and her journey into “the naked, howling future.” Through image and repetition, long and breathless insistence, this speaker finds what salvation is possible through the power of imagination; she imagines the possibility of health, of unconditional love, of finding a way, a reason, to go on. While this collection is relentless in its portrayal of doom and disaster, there is also a plumb line of hope that guides the reader through its darkest moments – hope that things could change for the better, and maybe they even will.
–Rachel Marie Patterson – Founder/Editor of Radar Poetry
Samantha Zeiner –
This book of poems manages to give beauty to pain. Ginna’s descriptive style swirls through the readers mind as it goes, not quite blunt, but not ephemeral either. While many of the pieces within this collection are literal recollections of pain and moments of growth and change, there is a quality to each poem that gives it a dreamy feel – something more than – something that makes you pause and think after each poem, and maybe re-read it to find something new within it and yourself. Ginna gives us ache and triumph and we feel it all along with her through each high and low as though we are chasing Alice down the rabbit hole.
Lines that struck me along the way:
“Note to Self” – “Thoughts are just thoughts. They can be anything you want them to be. Let’s make them a bird or a peach or a tornado siren. I’ve learned there is no imagination in despair. Now don’t move. Stay perfectly still.
Everything is beginning and the beginning is easy enough when you welcome mystery back into your shoulder blades. Draw silence into a simple circle.
Make it uncomplicated.”
“In the Hour Of My Own Undoing” – “I will cultivate a mile of green grass in the early summer rain. I will shake fog into a forest at night like someone who left and then returns for love. If love seems emptier still, I will remind you, even silence flourishes. If you listen closely….
…At the end of the day, I have to stop being so fearful.”
I will honestly read it again and again and get more from it each time, I am more than sure.