Lucky Boy by Mark Lilley

Mark Lilley’s Lucky Boy is filled with hints of unsettledness: bus tickets, a storm front, a rootless father, any number of nervously-smoked cigarettes. In cars, vans, pickups, and big rigs, characters seem almost continually on the move. What remains in place, however, is the poet—his unwavering allegiance to memory and attention, as if the poems are a response to Lowell’s question “Yet why not say what happened?” In a plain style that is deceptively simple, Lilley chooses just the right word or concrete detail, creates subtle sonic echoes, and leaps suddenly, briefly, into startling metaphors, so these clear-eyed poems are an expression, finally, of something deep and nearly unnameable—some sense that, whatever our afflictions and yearnings, it is still possible, and necessary, to love what we have been given. It is possible to consider ourselves lucky. We are lucky to have this beautiful, wise book.

–Chris Forhan, author of  My Father Before Me: A Memoir, Black Leapt In, The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, and Forgive Us Our Happiness

Mark Lilley’s debut collection, Lucky Boy, is a graceful and devastating volume, offered through the voice of a survivor.  These poems narrate the struggles, dysfunctions and failures of an American family through fearless disclosures, exquisite language, and gentle ironies.

I am deeply struck by this poet’s unwavering eye and ear and narrative balance—his aesthetic depth and steadiness in the thick of these disastrous, broken characters and settings.  Lilley’s tonal control is heroic, given the traumatized interior of these narrations.

Lilley’s poems remind us that the poem comes bravely, urgently out of the seizure of human despair.  It is their artistic and humane victory to transport us to these realms with compassionate insights, empathy and hard-earned tenderness.  These poems take us on the impossible yet inevitable journey to personal reckoning.

Mark Lilley’s lovely and relentless poems answer our human failures with a quiet embrace, acceptance, and a loving ferocity.  This is a book always to keep within reach.

–George Eklund, author of Altar, Wanting To Be an Element, The Island Blade, and Each Breath I Cannot Hold

Enter the deeply emotional world of Mark Lilley‘s Lucky Boy and you will encounter people striving to escape the inescapable, whether their fates or their hearts.  As these poems skillfully navigate the hard truths of poverty, alcoholism, and infidelity, they are punctuated by acts of kindness—from a trucker, a bereft mother, a river.  Lilley’s poetry itself is a profound act of unequivocal kindness.

In its devotion and attentiveness to the broken family, each poem “hold[s] [a] match steady until the stub glows.”   These poems depict both the wronged and the wrongdoer with an abiding compassion.  By the book’s end, we are listening to a river, understanding that everyone’s been wronged somehow.

Lilley’s beautifully understated images sing to us as we grieve “through patches of clover and foamflower, / and what they found downstream.”

I love these lyrical vignettes for their tenderness, for how they address losses often too deep to name.  “Why men drift, where men linger, / what happens when a woman receives word.” They speak with the hard-earned eloquence of a grief addressed and absorbed.

This is a book the world needs, especially now. It is a reminder to be empathetic, humble, and forgiving.  These poems will teach you to care.

–Alessandra Lynch, author of Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment and It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight