Wish Ave

Alessandra Lynch

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781949944662
• eBook ISBN: 9781949944389
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Wish Ave is about how vital intimate human conversation is to transformation and love.

Using a dream-like narrative, these poems combine three distinctive voices as it simultaneously loses and gains connections to others, plants, places, memories, and beyond. Memories are reanimated, reassessed, and re-envisioned in these whimsical poems. Voices carry the history of a life, the lives of those they’ve lived with, known, encountered, and interacted with. The two voices and the speaker’s voice carry the poems that cross time, relationships, boundaries between life and death. The voices create deep portraits of mentors, family members, and friends. Loneliness, tragedy, art, death, music, communion, connection, and consolation are all found here. These highly lyric poems have big emotional stakes.

There is palpable intensity, almost like the book is vibrating with trepidation, sorrow, fear, love, vibrancy, and uncertainty. The poems move water-like through visions and memory, personal myth, and prophecy. They don't feel beholden to expectations but free and insistent upon existing in their own space, on their own terms. There is a lot of risk in these poems, and the reward is in the connections and space between them.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• [Onto the lit doorstep of the world]
• The Speaker Runs through Shadows
• [Are we the daughter’s hands?]
• Two Voices Dispute Harmony Harmoniously
• After a Massacre of Wrens, the Speaker Tells the Story of Michiko
• We Need to Put Our Hands into the Earth to Feel Again
• [How to piece it together]
• What is at Stake for Us?
• The Speaker Shares a Story with One Voice
• [Our grievance is…]
• Crown Hill Cemetery
• Ire
• Boozeflower
• The Unmedaled Medaling
• Some Other Musings by the Voices
• Woebegone a funny word at first till the artillery and eyeless horses and the child drawing smiling devils hahahahahaha
• [Was that a dream we had?]
• Trying to Find Michiko: The Speaker Speaks to Someone She Thinks Is Michiko
• [Hello]
• They Want to Know
• Two Voices Contemplating Their Existence
• The Speaker Tells a Story. The Voices Ask a Question
• [The lamp is like a capsized ship]
• [Pink feather you were]
• Thrilling the Moon’s Completed Face
• The Story of the Speaker & the Stinkbug
• A Bout of Terrible Shrieking
• The Speaker Shares Her Fierce Wish with the Voices
• The Real Wish Ave
• [She has moved upstairs]
• Prelude
• Grebe
• [Why aren’t you speaking to me?]
• I Love My Brother
• The Voices Chatter about the Speaker’s Aforementioned Song
• The Speaker Tells the Story of Her Mentor
• The Speaker Says to One Voice: I Kept the Broken Objects
• Bright Red Spot
• [To know that Michiko returned]
• It All Happened So Quickly
• [The Speaker Makes a Pronouncement]
• Witnessing It
• The Children Return, the Speaker Reports
• The Voices Come out of the Woodwork for Solace
• [I can’t believe you told them!]
• [Four strawberries I drop into your drinking glass]
• Acknowledgments