The Mouth of Which You Are by Jenna Lynch

In this marvelous debut, Jenna Lynch explores forbidden territories of eros and trauma. Hers is a skilled, narratively condensed, and adventurous poetry, ranging through memory and the deeper levels of psyche in the self as both protagonist and memoirist serve as sites of consciousness for trauma and insight. She enters into her poems as though they were the mother’s body, the lover’s, and her own, themselves each inhabited by ghosts of the Shoah, Sigmund Freud, and Orphic lyricism itself. The lines are supple as a steel scalpel that cuts and leaves you bleeding in awe for such quick, erotic assassinations, for such intimate acts of forgiveness.
–Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road

The collection is a “mouth open in an unanswered prayer,” a poetry of embodied provocation, relentless in its deep observation of the fractured self and the intimate other, from m(other) to br(other) to lover to imagining an(other). Its voices take on persona to unearth the darkest facets of our humanity, unflinchingly confronting us with our “Naked” selves—in body, mind, and “souls rising all around.” Lynch’s poetics is unafraid. Her poems are necessary.
–Julia Kolchinksy Dasbach, author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars