Wish Ave by Alessandra Lynch
Courtsey of Alice James and artist
Wish Ave is a dream-like narrative that combines three distinctive voices as it simultaneously loses and gains connections to others, plants, places, mem- ories, and beyond. Memories are reanimated, reassessed, and re-envisioned. Voices carry the history of a life, the lives of those they’ve lived with, known, encountered, 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. Lone- liness, tragedy, art, death, music, communion, connection, and consolation are all found here. There is palpable intensity, almost like the book is vibrat- ing 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.
“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.”
Courtsey of Alice James and artist
Alessandra Lynch’s most recent collection of poetry, Pretty Tripwire, was published in 2021. It was semi-finalist for the Julie Suk Award. In 2023, the poem “Hymnal” from Pretty Tripwire was used as the libretto for composer Harriet Steinke’s eponymous song cycle. Alessandra is also the author of three other poetry collections: Sails the Wind Left Behind (winner of the Alice James New England/NewYork Award), It was aterrible cloud at twilight (winner of the Lena Miles Wever-Todd Award), and Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment (winner of the Balcones Prize, finalist for the LA Times Book Award and the UNT Rilke Prize, listed as a NY Times top ten poetry books of 2017). Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The NewEngland Review, The Kenyon Review, Plougshares, and other journals. Alessandra has received residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Lannan Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She has also been the recipient of a Barbara Deming Award and a Creative Renewal Fellowship Award from the Arts Council of Indianapolis. In May 2021, she was a featured blogger for Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books. Currently, Alessandra serves as Butler University’s poet in residence where she teaches in the undergraduate and MFA programs. Alessandra’s fifth book of poetry, Wish Ave, will be published by Alice James Books in 2024.
Alessandra Lynchl’s Wish Ave was released in October of 2024 and can be found at Alice James Books on their site here. The magazine’s interview with Alessandra can be found here.
