Wish Ave October 2024
Click on the cover to order.
“…There is a grandeur about such a style and project that might remind us of the Brownings, both Robert and Elizabeth. The speaker and voices carrying across and through, answers and questions in various orders, the birdfeet and human bodies, burning forests, more questions and one Michiko who leaves at the beginning but is never gone and then returns, like the book itself once it enters the reader’s mind. It is as though Wish Ave is the response to the bird in Eliot’s first quartet, about just how much reality humans can bear. Alessandra Lynch has written beyond the moment, and deeply of the moment, a form of salvation we must all hope to earn.”
—Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth
One of Library Journal’s The Readers’ Almanac 2024 Books to Know:
“Alessandra Lynch’s Wish Ave (Alice James, Oct.) uses multiple voices to discover a new language and new world.”
From the Library Journal review by Barbara Hoffert:
“A haunting study of fateful human relationships…It’s lyrical indeed, and if not exactly inconclusive then evanescent, even spooky as it pulls readers deep into its mysteries…Multiple voices help tell the story, and there’s a ceremonious, masque-like feel…”
From Indiana Authors Awards review by Jessica Thompson
“To read Alessandra Lynch’s fifth book of poetry, Wish Ave…is to inhabit the shadowlands, to examine the subliminal spaces that lurk just below the surface of this world. We become a voyeur to private conversations and interactions between the Speaker (the author) and two unnamed Voices. In doing so, we find ourselves swept away in an out-of-its-banks slow moving river rich in language and vivid in details…Lynch’s narrative is wistful, each poem a stolen breath…Lynch’s lyrical voice had me transfixed. This book is part cautionary fairy tale, part hard-won treasure—each lesson a black pearl brought up by a skilled cliff diver.”