Mind Lit in Neon by R.J. Lambert

In Mind Lit in Neon, RJ Lambert imagines a world where mother, father, and brother mingle with Camus and Borges and Stein, Nancy Reagan and Whitney Houston. Let the revelations come as they may, this world is alive to itself and moving to the music Lambert paints: all our days and nights: the siren of an ambulance, the first robin, a morning’s breeze—so many sounds vivid against the skin.

–Mary Ann Samyn, author of Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance

The wind blows through these poems, as if through a sax or a bassoon—the limitless delights of nature activating the narrowest corridors of human invention to produce strange and melancholic melodies. “Sometimes the quiet conjugates me like a verb,” Lambert writes, summarizing this book’s attention both to silence and to language, and to the poet’s own two-way portal between them: his titular (and singular) “mind.” A series of poems devoted to “streaming” music, from Chopin and Mozart to Whitney Houston and Frank Ocean, demonstrate Lambert’s virtuosic ear, while his true forbears are Auden, Bishop, Merrill, and Doty (though he does a killer impression of Stein). With grace, grit, wit, and winsomeness, Lambert forms out of the quiet atoms of verse a fierce and lively hand. That hand, I’m pleased to report, plays unforgettable music.

–Justin Jannise, author of How to Be Better by Being Worse