The Lyric Essay as Resistance

The inventive formats dazzle, finding novel ways to drive home each piece's message and testifying to the rewards found when writers are willing to break the rules. These selections exemplify the profound possibilities inherent in the lyric essay.

~Publisher's Weekly

With Auden’s elegy for Yeats, we tend to fixate on what poetry—or the lyric—can’t do and forget that he goes on to say, ‘it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper.’ Indeed, its survival helps us better endure. This brilliant gathering of essayists that Bossiere and Trabold have curated for us is aimed square against kyriarchy. And the collection has me convinced. The lyric can be a powerful tool of resistance. Some truths can only be uttered from the margins.

~Geoffrey Babbitt, .

The view from the literary 'margins' has never looked as inspiring or as invigorating as it does in this collection of blazing bold voices that are pumping blood into the essay's very heart.

~John D’Agata

This important and exciting anthology reveals how lyric essays can be both marginal and central, experimental yet sure, fluid and sound, haunted by ghosts but by beauty too. The Lyric Essay as Resistance is a gorgeous showcase of what the lyric essay can do.

~Randon Billings Noble

I can easily see this fine anthology included in any of the courses I teach. The twenty essays herein do the triple-duty work of modeling the lyric form, expanding the platform for said form, and challenging the form to stretch so it can accommodate new, and necessary, literary voices.

~Elena Passarello