Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Blessing of Dark Water
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1981
WEBSITE:
CITY: Houston
STATE: TX
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://alicejamesbooks.org/authors/lyons-elizabeth/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-lyons-430b079/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2017002803
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017002803
HEADING: Lyons, Elizabeth, 1981-
000 00539nz a2200169n 450
001 10354424
005 20170118132810.0
008 170118n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2017002803
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC
046 __ |f 1981-10-19 |2 edtf
053 _0 |a PS3612.Y5746
100 1_ |a Lyons, Elizabeth, |d 1981-
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a The blessing of dark water, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Elizabeth Lyons)
670 __ |a Email from publisher, January 18, 2017: |b Her name is Elizabeth Lyons and her date of birth is 10/19/1981
PERSONAL
Born October 19, 1981.
EDUCATION:Purdue University, M.F.A.; University of Houston, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Fellowships and awards from organizations, including the Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Academy of American Poets, and the I-Park Foundation.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poems to publications, including Tin House, Salt Hill, New South, and Indiana Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Elizabeth Lyons is a poet based in Houston, Texas. She earned an M.F.A. from Purdue University and went on to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. Lyons has written poems that have been featured in publications, including Tin House, Salt Hill, New South, and Indiana Review. She has been awarded prizes and fellowships from organizations, including the Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Academy of American Poets, and the I-Park Foundation.
In 2017, Lyons released her first collection of poems, The Blessing of Dark Water. Some of the poems in the volume make reference to the life of Water Inglis Anderson, a painter and sculptor who lived from 1903 to 1965. During the 1930s, Anderson was placed in the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. In 1939, he escaped from the asylum, drawing a large mural featuring seabirds on the side of the building as he left. He used bed sheets to construct a rope that lowered him from his room on the third story, and he used soap to draw the seabirds. In Lyons’s poetry collection, she discusses Anderson’s issues with mental health and suggests she has dealt with mental illness, too. The first poem in the book is called “I. Illness: Elizabeth.” In it, she describes her interactions (or lack thereof) with her family members regarding her mental illness. This poem is followed by “I. Illness: Walter,” in which Lyons describes Anderson’s family’s reactions upon his release from a mental institution. Anderson is the narrator of a poem called “Extinction,” in which he recounts the diagnosis the mental institution gave for his symptoms. Descriptions of a theatre set appear at the beginning of “Like a Kindness, Like an Interrogation.” Later in the poem, the narrator describes her former self to Anderson. Other poems in the book include “II. Elizabeth” and “In the Waiting Room.”
A contributor to Publishers Weekly described The Blessing of Dark Water as “moving.” The contributor added: “Lyons’s observational acuity, straightforward syntax, and thorough narratives keep readers oriented.” The same contributor concluded: “Lyons’s humble and empathetic poems are wrought with tangible emotion.” Gillie Collins, reviewer on the BOMB website, suggested: “Aside from its unforgettable, creepy imagery, The Blessing of Dark Water succeeds in part because the poet’s obsession proves contagious. Before I read this series, I had never heard of Walter Inglis Anderson; afterward, I spent hours combing the Internet for traces of his life, art, and mental state. What I found is what Lyons conveys so deftly: no diagnosis is complete.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, March 27, 2017, review of The Blessing of Dark Water, p. 73.
ONLINE
Alice James Books Website, http://alicejamesbooks.org/ (November 15, 2017), author profile.
BOMB, https://bombmagazine.org/ (August 21, 2017), Gillie Collins, review of The Blessings of Dark Water.
Elizabeth Lyons holds a PhD from the University of Houston and an MFA from Purdue University. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Indiana Review, New South, and Salt Hill. A recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Vermont Studio Center, the I-Park Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, she lives in Houston, TX
QUOTED: "moving."
"Lyons's observational acuity, straightforward syntax, and thorough narratives keep readers oriented."
"Lyon's humble and empathetic poems are wrought with tangible emotion."
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510680594990 1/1
Print Marked Items
The Blessing of Dark Water
Publishers Weekly.
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p73.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Blessing of Dark Water
Elizabeth Lyons. Alice James, $15.95 trade paper (100p) ISBN 978-1-938584-33-6
Lyons grapples with the nature of mental illness in her moving debut collection, switching between her personal
perspective and that of Walter Inglis Anderson, an American painter who is believed to have had a form of
schizoaffective disorder. The work touches upon a number of themes, including alienation, genetic predestination, the
power of imagination, madness and artistic enlightenment, and the relationship between perception and reality. Lyons's
observational acuity, straightforward syntax, and thorough narratives keep readers oriented while traversing the
sensuous "dark water" of mental illness. Lyons explains the cognitive dissonance in feeling unstable yet confident in
one's identity: "I'm only Elizabeth when I'm in trouble." She gives a voice to Anderson's wife, who endured physical
abuse due to Anderson's delusions. "I am made of potter's clay/ so when you put your hand to my throat you are really//
molding me," Lyons writes. Over the course of the book, Lyons also reflects on the feigned humanity of mental
hospitals, describes a drug--no longer used--that caused bone-fracturing epileptic convulsions, and reflects on the
outwardly compassionate gesture of hosting asylum balls: "Even the crazy look sane given tempo." As an intriguing
touch, she includes quotes from Anderson, his doctors, and his wife to flesh out his presence, Lyon's humble and
empathetic poems are wrought with tangible emotion. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Blessing of Dark Water." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 73+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928090&it=r&asid=6ef0633227d62c24c3ae3085ca872800.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928090
QUOTED: "Aside from its unforgettable, creepy imagery, The Blessing of Dark Water succeeds in part because the poet’s obsession proves contagious. Before I read this series, I had never heard of Walter Inglis Anderson; afterward, I spent hours combing the Internet for traces of his life, art, and mental state. What I found is what Lyons conveys so deftly: no diagnosis is complete."
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Knife, Paintbrush, Pen: on Elizabeth Lyons’s The Blessing of Dark Water by Gillie Collins
New York Live Arts presents
Marjani Forte
Nov 15-19
Aug 21, 2017
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Futurism, Hashtags, & the Old Wild West by Jeffrey Grunthaner
Buck Studies 01
275220178 08082017 Walter Anderson Little Room 01
Walter Ingils Anderson’s “Little Room” in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Photograph by William Colgin. Courtesy of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art.
One morning in 1939, the staff of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum woke to a curious sight: a patient’s room was empty, and a mural of large, white seabirds commandeered the building’s brick façade. The culprit turned out to be Walter Inglis Anderson, a New Orleanian painter and sculptor, who had escaped through his third-story window using a rope of strung-together bed sheets. During his descent, he stopped and hovered, drawing skimmers with a bar of Ivory soap.
The Blessing of Dark Water (Alice James Books), Elizabeth Lyons’s debut poetry collection, sets up a conversation between Anderson and a potentially autobiographical speaker, who also deals with mental health issues. Lyons sees in language what Anderson saw in asylum-issued soap: the potential to communicate. Like graffiti on the face of an institution, these poems talk back to diagnosis, pointing out—then subverting—the walls we build between the so-called sane and insane. The first two poems, “I. Illness: Elizabeth” and “I. Illness: Walter,” both take place in hospitals, 70 years and hundreds of miles apart. This distance is established not only through bracketed epigraphs, “Chicago, IL. Winter, 2007” and “Baltimore, MD. Winter, 1937,” but also physically: to get from one poem to its counterpart, we must turn a page. And yet, Elizabeth calls out to Anderson from across this void: “For a weekend, Walter, my mind. Beast.” With this strikethrough, the speaker acknowledges her own editing process—the parts of her mind she must nix in order to be declared “healthy.”
Both Walter and Elizabeth struggle to communicate their emotional realities to their loved ones. “I. Illness: Walter” follows Anderson’s release from a hospital. Afterward, his family looks for signs of recovery: “Perhaps he walked the dock and didn’t look for his skiff or to / the island. Gave the family hope.” Elizabeth’s family also picks her up from a hospital, but no party feels equipped to name the experience: “I don’t take pills. / I recover. / We don’t speak of it.” Together, these endings illuminate the gap between how we feel and what we say.
The rest of the collection aims to inhabit this uncomfortable chasm and, where possible, connect worlds. In “Extinction,” a persona poem from Anderson’s perspective, self-expression comes across as an antidote to medicalization, a reminder that every patient is a person first.
the papers they give to my wife
saying Walter Anderson, dementia praeco
recurring delusions (self as bird—self as god—self
as father) catatonic/manic episodes
these papers are a code
meaning why is he still alive
Here, the diagnosis is italicized text, removed from Anderson’s lived experience. To be comprehended, “dementia praecox” must be translated into poetry: the patient’s delusions, “(self as bird—self as god—self / as father),” sound like premises for persona poems. As “Extinction” continues, Anderson reclaims the tools of self-representation, refusing to be reduced to a lab report:
my wings are grown together
stop calling them ribs
just give me a knife
I will show you
when I’m open
The knife, like the pen or paintbrush, is an instrument used to expose and label.
Seizing this device, Anderson aims to show rather than be shown. He represents his own hybridity.
275619558 07132017 Bettercover
Likewise, The Blessing of Dark Water resists escapism. Lyons enters the mind of a 20th century painter to get back into her own. “Like a Kindness, Like an Interrogation” begins by establishing an interrogation scene: “(Two wood chairs. Later, a hatchet. One lamp behind the chair to stage left. The neck of the lamp stretches above your head).” Formatted like stage directions, these lines establish Walter as the object of her inquiry. Then, almost immediately, the roles are reversed, in the form of an epistle: “Walter, / I was pretty once. I had grace.” This address repeats throughout the poem, as if the speaker is stuttering, searching, groping for some pure and healthy self.
What she finds, instead, is a sense of solidarity: the intuition that some version of what she feels has been felt before. In “II. Elizabeth,” a poem in the book’s opening section, the speaker identifies “an Elizabeth / haunting an artist, long gone, wanting answers.” Here, Lyons refers to Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” a poem about a sudden rush of self-awareness, which turns on the line: “I felt: you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth / you are one of them.” For both the speaker of Bishop’s poem and the Elizabeth(s) in The Blessing of Dark Water, self-discovery is social rather than solitary. It requires identifying with others, past and present, and the pursuit of collectivity.
Over the course of the book, Lyons performs this kind of empathy—taking up multiple personas, including the vantages of Anderson’s wife and brother. She often refuses to clarify both the speaker and her audience: “Some pole during the day, / skimming the water to hook a gator / but night demands more. / Demands that you are calm, / that you breathe and follow the current.” The second person tempts readers to wade into the familiar, dark waters and find a strange splendor, even peace.
Aside from its unforgettable, creepy imagery, The Blessing of Dark Water succeeds in part because the poet’s obsession proves contagious. Before I read this series, I had never heard of Walter Inglis Anderson; afterward, I spent hours combing the Internet for traces of his life, art, and mental state. What I found is what Lyons conveys so deftly: no diagnosis is complete.
Gillie Collins writes about books, movies, and visual art. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Seventh Row.
poetry mental health american south identity illness
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