Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: This Impossible Light
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.lilymyerswrites.com/
CITY: Seattle
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.lilymyerswrites.com/bio/ * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/239111/lily-myers * https://www.theodysseyonline.com/lily-myers-shrinking-women * https://www.bustle.com/articles/190924-slam-poet-lily-myers-is-releasing-a-novel-in-verse-about-eating-disorders-self-worth
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2017026824
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017026824
HEADING: Myers, Lily
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670 __ |a This impossible light, 2017: |b ECIP title page (Lily Myers)
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Wesleyan University, B.A., 2015.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and poet. Speaker at Oregon Psychiatric Association, the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, and the TedX Wellesley College conference.
AVOCATIONS:Feminist spirituality.
AWARDS:Wesleyan University College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, Best Love Poem, “Shrinking Women,” 2013.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Lily Myers is a writer and poet. Her poem, “Shrinking Women,” won Best Love Poem at the 2013 Wesleyan University College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. The recording of her poetry reading garnered more than five million views on YouTube.
Myers attended college at Wesleyan, where she competed on the slam poetry team and studied poetry and writing. She has spoken at high schools and colleges and at numerous organizations, including Oregon Psychiatric Association, the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, and the TedX Wellesley College conference. Myers’ writing has appeared on the youth site of the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), Proud2BMe, and their magazine, Making Connections. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
This Impossible Light, Myers first book, tells the story of Ivy, a teenager navigating family, friends, and illness. Writing in Voice of Youth Advocates, Nancy K. Wallace stated that Myers “deals with teen problems so sensitively and beautifully.”
As Ivy enters her sophomore year of high school, it seems that few things in her life are stable. At home, her parents have recently separated, her brother has just left for college, and her mother is slipping into a deep depression. Her social life is challenging as well. Her best friend, Anna, who spent the summer in Paris, has returned cooler, more stylish, and with an equally hip new best friend to take Ivy’s place.
Ivy, a straight-A student, finds solace in math, the only thing that seems to exist unchanged. While focusing on math helps her during school hours, the rest of her life feels out of control. To gain some sense of security, Ivy begins obsessing over the one thing she is able to control: her body. She has grown in height and weight over the summer. Witnessing the slimness of her depressed mother and fashion and diet-obsessed former best friend, Ivy sees the appeal of taking control of her life through her relationship with food and exercise.
She begins bicycling everyday and reducing her caloric intake. As she begins to lose weight, she sees a new side of herself emerging. While she is initially happy with the weight loss, the new version of Ivy includes another, darker side. What begins as a healthy habit quickly becomes an obsession.
“Ivy begins using numbers to control her life, viewing her growing eating disorder as an equation,” wrote a contributor to Kirkus Reviews. She describes her body and food intake in the same terms that she used to use to understand math. Her talent with numbers makes calorie counting an easy task, and she spins into cycles of false logic and equations to justify and maintain her controlled eating.
Ivy comes to understand the seriousness of her disorder when it prevents her from attending a math competition for which she has been studying all year. Too weak from fatigue and hunger, Ivy’s concentration fails her. Her grades fall, and her health is in shambles. She must then begin the difficult journey of recovery. While, in her mind, her eating disorder was affecting only her, her recovery process is complex, requiring her to not only look at herself, but look at her relationships with those around her.
Briana Shemroske in Booklist found that Myers’ stylistic choices “nimbly underscore questions of emptiness and control, fluctuation and resilience.” The book is written in verse, with the story line moving along with each poem. Myers plays with style and form, moving poems around on the page and leaving significant blank space. The book details a teenager’s struggles with an eating disorder and familial relationships, while also presenting a unique way of telling a story. A contributor to Publishers Weekly described This Impossible Light as “an exceptional novel in verse.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2017, Briana Shemroske, review of This Impossible Light, p. 52.
Horn Book Magazine, July-August 2017, Anastasia M. Collins, review of This Impossible Light, p. 138.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2017, review of This Impossible Light.
Publishers Weekly, April 10, 2017, review of This Impossible Light, p. 73.
Voice of Youth Advocates, June, 2017, Nancy K. Wallace and Helena Kalantisz, review of This Impossible Light, p. 70.
ONLINE
Lily Myers Homepage, https://www.lilymyerswrites.com (January 20, 2018).
Seattle Weekly, http://www.seattleweekly.com/ (August 23, 2017), Paul Constant, review of This Impossible Light.*
Lily Myers
Home Bio This Impossible Light Published Work Video
Besides writing, I have a passionate love for feminist spirituality. I study the history of witchcraft as well as its place in contemporary feminism. I'm an avid Tarot reader, a lover of goddess lore, and a devoted studier of the moon phases. I blog about Tarot here. You can also find me reading, taking walks in the Seattle rain, and hanging out with my baby corn snake, Calliope H. Danger.
contact me: myers.lilyr@gmail.com
Represented by Erin Murphy at Erin Murphy Literary Agency
I'm an author and poet from Seattle, Washington. I graduated from Wesleyan University in 2015, where I competed on the slam poetry team and won Best Love Poem at the 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational for my poem "Shrinking Women," which went on to garner over 5 million views on YouTube. Since then, I have worked to combine my love of writing with my passions for feminism, self-love, and body confidence. I've given talks and readings at high schools, colleges, and other organizations including the Oregon Psychiatric Association, the Women's Therapy Centre Institute, and the TedX Wellesley College conference.
Screen Shot 2017-07-29 at 1.12.42 PM.png
POWERED BY SQUARESPACE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lily Myers (www.lilymyerswrites.com) graduated from Wesleyan University, where she competed on the slam poetry team and won Best Love Poem at the 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational for her poem “Shrinking Women.” Lily has also written for NEDA’s youth site, Proud2BMe, and their magazine, Making Connections. She lives in Seattle, Washington. You can follow Lily on Twitter @lmyerspoetry.
Why Lily Myers' "Shrinking Women" Is Necessary
We are all shrinking women, whether we notice it or not.
If you haven't listened to Lily Myers' spoken word poem "Shrinking Women," you can listen here or read a transcript here. It's only about three and a half minutes long, and it'll change your life. The first time I heard it, I cried all over my laptop. Like ugly, Kim-K-would-be-proud cried.
To quickly summarize it, Lily Myers' slam poem is all about women's place in society. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, there's a lot more to it than that. It's a moving piece that sounds like music that exemplifies something that all women know: Women are taught to be less. Yes, to be less, you read that right. In size and in opinion and in every aspect of our lives.
This week, I wanted to break down some of the lines of the poem and talk about what they mean and why it's important to recognize this behavior in society and in ourselves.
Myers opens the poem by talking about her mother.
"Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass. She says she doesn't deprive herself, but I've learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork. In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate."
This is a behavior I have noticed in the women in my life and a behavior I have found myself imitating. Every woman in my life is dieting or has dieted, my own mother included. Every woman in my life is constantly conscious about her weight and how she looks to everyone else, regardless of whether or not she is happy. I don't think they know if they're happy or unhappy because they have been taught for so long to be unhappy. Body positivity is not a big practice in most families.
She then talks about her father.
"She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she's 'crazy about fruit.'"
These lines are interesting to me. As her mother learns to take up less space, her father takes up more. Not just physically, though, because he speaks for his new girlfriend, who is also learning to take up less space (thus her diet). He takes up the space she cannot have, but he also says that words she cannot say.
Then her brother Jonas steps onto the scene.
"My brother never thinks before he speaks. I have been taught to filter. 'How can anyone have a relationship to food?' he asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs. I want to say: we come from difference, Jonas, you have been taught to grow out, I have been taught to grow in. You learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence, you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much. I learned to absorb. I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself."
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This section really illustrates how much we learn from our parents. It's a perfect example of what saying things like "he's a growing boy" can do. Jonas has learned from his father how to wax while his sister wanes, to borrow her earlier metaphor. But it's taken a step farther with her brother: He takes more space in a conversation as well. He has learned to speak his mind, while Lily has learned to keep to herself.
She later reflects on how these dynamics not only affect her home life, but her school life as well.
"I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word 'sorry.' I don't know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza..."
This is the part of the piece that speaks to me the most. I also start all of my questions in class with the word "sorry." But why? Why am I not entitled to my space? It all circles back to how women are raised by women seeing how little space our mother take up, and how little space we are allowed to have.
Women are allowed in every aspect of society - college, the workplace, the military - but our mindsets haven't quite caught up. We are unsure of ourselves in these places we have so long been barred from entering.
So thank you, Lily Myers, for articulating so clearly something that I have always known to be true, but could never find the words to explain. Thank you for shouting about silence and showing women everywhere that it's okay to feel this way, but you can change these feelings by acknowledging them. I refuse to apologize for asking questions in class anymore. I refuse to make my body image my number one priority.
I refuse to shrink.
Slam Poet Lily Myers Is Releasing A Novel In Verse About Eating Disorders & Self-Worth — SEE THE COVER
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By CRISTINA ARREOLA Oct 21 2016
Slam poetry sensation Lily Myers is taking the leap into the written word with This Impossible Light, a novel in verse about body image, eating disorders, and the scars we inherit from our parents.
You may recognize Myers from the video of her performance of "Shrinking Woman" at 2013's College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, where it won Best Love Poem. Five million people have watched the performance; if you haven't, take the opportunity to do so now. The poem, like the novel, speaks to the trauma of living with a mother with an eating disorder and how that experience can impact one's own self-worth. On a broader level, however, Myers speaks about how women have inherited these eating disorders for generations — shrinking to take up less space, shrinking to make room for men.
"[My mother] wanes while my father waxes," she says. "His stomach has grown round with wine, late-night's oysters, poetry, a new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports she's now 'crazy about fruit.' It was the same with his parents. As my grandmother became frail and angular, her husband swelled to red-round cheeks, rotund stomach, and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking, making space for the entrance of men into their lives. Not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave. I have been taught accommodation."
This Impossible Light centers on 16-year-old Ivy, a girl whose world has been upended. Her father moved out; her mom has withdrawn into herself; her brother left for college; and her best friend came back from Paris more concerned with boys than friendship. But Ivy's biggest challenges stem from her frustrations with her own body: she can't stop growing, can't stop expanding. Though she takes refuge in her favorite subject — math — she can't help but feel insecure about her changing body.
But one day she skips a meal, and she feels a sudden jolt of empowerment. She notices her mom has stopped eating, too. In an attempt to find purpose and control, she begins to eat less. Sometimes, she doesn't eat at all, and when eats too much, she purges. But what begins as an empowering act suddenly becomes something far more dangerous and unhealthy, and it could impact Ivy's ability to participate in an upcoming math competition. Now, she has to figure out how to wade through her own illness while grappling with her mother's. Most of all, she must find a path to becoming her own person.
See the cover for This Impossible Light below:
This Impossible Lightis available for pre-order now.
Young Poet Lily Myers on Going Viral and Writing Her First Novel
JUN 6
Young Poet Lily Myers on Going Viral and Writing Her First Novel
CULTURE
Lily Myers first fell in love with poetry in high school because, as she explains, “it felt free—like there was no wrong answer and I could write anything I wanted.” Fast-forward a few years, with gut-wrenchingly honest pieces (and viral performances) to her name, the Wesleyan grad is gearing up to release her debut novel. This Impossible Light, which is written in verse, comes out today. Before you pick up a copy, read our interview with Lily (and an exclusive book excerpt!) below.
Tell us about the inspiration behind This Impossible Light.
Both the poem and novel are largely about loneliness—feeling very alone with these internal pressures to shrink, fighting this silent battle. In the aftermath of the poem, when I saw that so many other people felt this same loneliness, I knew it was worth unearthing and discussing. That’s where a lot of the inspiration for This Impossible Light came from—wanting to explore, and expose, this certain type of loneliness I felt as a teenager and still feel in certain ways. The loneliness of your self-expectations, of never feeling good enough, of being unsure of your worth. For me, and I think for a lot of other people, this loneliness shows up in how we treat our bodies. I wanted to be honest about these pressures. I dug a lot into my own experience for the book. This Impossible Light is really my love letter to my younger, insecure, lonely self.
Who are a few other poets every girl should know about/read?
The spoken word duo Dark Matter is totally revolutionary. Franny Choi is one of my all-time favorites; she’s incredible. Caroline Rothstein is an amazing poet and a huge influence on me. Rachel McKibbens, Sierra DeMulder, and Hieu Minh Nguyen are also long-time favorites of mine.
You’re a huge self-love advocate. Can you share a little bit about your own experience learning to love yourself?
Yes! We live in a culture that makes it very difficult for girls to love themselves. From a very young age, we’re inundated with images and messages about how our bodies must look. We’re told that our worth is tied to our physical appearance. We’re told that we must keep striving to be perfect. And we internalize these messages. It’s highly destructive. Beginning to love myself first meant recognizing all these forces. Once I could recognize that, and recognize that self-love was an act of resistance to these pressures, that was a crucial first step.
Self-love also means getting to know myself, and being forgiving of myself. That’s still the hardest part for me—accepting that I am flawed and will continue to make mistakes. It’s helpful for me to remember that self-love is not something you achieve once. It’s a practice, and you can practice it daily.
You’re also big on body positivity. How old were you when you first became passionate about it, and what led to it?
For a long time I’d felt a huge pressure to control my body, to maintain a certain weight, to exercise constantly. I truly felt that my worth was tied to those things. Once I started learning about feminism and self-love my freshman year of college, I realized that spending all this mental energy and time worrying about a few pounds was stopping me from pursuing my passions or reaching my full potential. I realized that I wanted to think about more interesting stuff than calories all the time.
I love being grateful to my body, for functioning and keeping me alive and healthy. Our bodies are incredible! Can we love them instead of criticizing them all the time?
Read an exclusive excerpt from This Impossible Light:
How We Used to Be
A house wild
with mess and laughter.
Dad making soup on Sunday afternoons
in a huge pot on the stove
belting jazz standards as he stirred.
Mom painting in her studio.
Sky and I building pillow forts in the living room.
All of us driving every summer
to the Oregon Coast,
Sky and I speaking a secret language
reading chapter books
inventing games
in the backseat of the minivan.
Mom and I leaving each other notes
going to the park
driving to the waterfront
on the first warm day each year
dipping our toes
in summer’s imminent approach.
My body curling into hers,
fitting so easily into the space
she made for me beside her.
A montage,
a golden family video,
a memory of someone else’s life,
the girl I used to be.
A girl I barely recognize.
A girl I envy,
a girl I mourn.
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Print Marked Items
Myers, Lily. This Impossible Light
Nancy K. Wallace and Helena Kalantisz
Voice of Youth Advocates.
40.2 (June 2017): p70.
COPYRIGHT 2017 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.voya.com
Full Text:
5Q * 4P * M * J * S
Myers, Lily. This Impossible Light. Philomel/Penguin Random House, 2017. 352p. $17.99. 978-0-399-
17372-1.
At fifteen, Ivy finds her world irrevocably changed. Her parents separate and her brother moves out, and Ivy
looks forward to the only stability in her life--school. An excellent student, Ivy loves math's dependability
and structure, but even at school some things have changed. Ivy's best friend, Anna, who spent the summer
in Paris, has returned with a new fashion sense and a new best friend. The two girls alienate Ivy with their
chatter about clothes, weight, and drinking parties. Ivy's mom, severely depressed, wastes away to a fragile
ghost of herself as Ivy grows larger. Faced on all sides by slimmer, more fashionable women, Ivy starts a
weight loss campaign. Biking long distances daily and existing on next to nothing to eat, she sees a different
version of herself begin to emerge. This new obsession leads to anorexia, causing her to miss a coveted
math competition that she has studied for all year.
Lyrical poetry tells Ivy's story with grace and passion. Entering Ivy's life, readers will weep and laugh at the
consequences of her actions. She deals with so many relatable teen issues, and yet rejects any help that
adults offer her. She strives and fails, only to rise again. Her relationship with her brother is sweet and
understated. Cut off from her parents and friends, upon whom she relied for help in decision-making, Ivy
becomes the master of her own fate. The author paints a beautiful picture of a young woman coming to
terms with her life and emerging with a bright new sense of self. The author deals with teen problems so
sensitively and beautifully. Every YA library needs this book. --Nancy K. Wallace.
This Impossible Light holds readers' interest with its relatable characters and mesmerizing plot. The
characters are not only believable, but also memorable and engaging because of their actions and thoughts,
written so meaningfully in lyrical free verse. So many people go through what the characters in this book go
through and can relate to what they are feeling and thinking, making it a must-read for young adults. 5Q, 4P.
--Helena Kalantisz, Teen Reviewer.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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Wallace, Nancy K., and Helena Kalantisz. "Myers, Lily. This Impossible Light." Voice of Youth Advocates,
June 2017, p. 70. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497860345/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aedac92b. Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
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This Impossible Light
Anastasia M. Collins
The Horn Book Magazine.
93.4 (July-August 2017): p138+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
Full Text:
This Impossible Light
by Lily Myers
Middle School, High School Philomel 343 pp.
6/17 978-0-399-17372-1 $17.99
Fifteen-year-old Ivy Lewis is a straight-A student who takes comfort in the familiar predictability of her
sophomore year. Her father has moved out, her mother is slipping further into depression, her brother has
left for college, and her best friend seems to have left her behind. Ivy appreciates the unfailing certainty of
math equations--"2 + 2 will always be 4. / The quadratic equation always works. / Numbers keep their
promises."
But solutions in the rest of her life are not so easily grasped, and Ivy begins to fixate on the one thing she
can control: herself. Her body becomes the machine whose input of calories she will strictly limit for a more
perfect output, powering through the weakness of hunger and fatigue until her concentration, her grades,
and her health eventually collapse. This verse novel's form perfectly mirrors its content as readers move
from poem to poem, from thought to thought, following Ivy through the false logic that triggers and sustains
her disordered eating--and into the beginning of the much more difficult steps of grief and recovery.
ANASTASIA M. COLLINS
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Collins, Anastasia M. "This Impossible Light." The Horn Book Magazine, July-Aug. 2017, p. 138+.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500260375/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9c53dce6. Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
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Myers, Lily: THIS IMPOSSIBLE LIGHT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Myers, Lily THIS IMPOSSIBLE LIGHT Philomel (Children's Fiction) $17.99 6, 6 ISBN: 978-0-399-
17372-1
Her life in upheaval, Ivy finds solace in controlling her caloric intake. Ivy's once-close family, all white, is
coming apart. Her dad has a girlfriend, and her brother has also moved out. Now it's just Ivy and her mother
at home. But her mother is progressively disappearing into depression. So when her sophomore year starts,
Ivy can't wait to see her white best friend, Anna, who has just returned from Europe. But now Anna has a
new best friend and a new beer pong pastime. Ivy is a "Smart Girl." She adores math and trusts numbers for
their constancy. She enters an arithmetic competition, but the weight of grief and loneliness sends her
careening into obsessiveness. Ivy begins using numbers to control her life, viewing her growing eating
disorder as an equation: "My body / is a function. / And I know / that the lower my x is / the less I put inside
of me / the better / my output / will be." The distinct quality of this topical novel is Ivy's voice and
composition. Written in evocative verse, with notes of wonder and despair, the cadence flows across and
down the pages with grace: "I never knew silence / could take up a whole room: / sitting on all the chairs, /
climbing up the stairway, / thick in the air like fog." Lifted beyond the confines of the problem novel with
its lyricism and resonance. (Verse/fiction. 12-16)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Myers, Lily: THIS IMPOSSIBLE LIGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A489268460/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=97c47603.
Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
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This Impossible Light
Briana Shemroske
Booklist.
113.18 (May 15, 2017): p52+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
This Impossible Light. By Lily Myers. June 2017. 352p. Philomel, $17.99 (9780399173721). Gr. 8-11.
Slam poet Myers serves up a poignant portrait of one tenth-grader's struggle with disordered eating. For Ivy
Lewis, numbers have always kept "their promises." However, after her parents split, her brother leaves for
college, and her best friend returns from a summer in Paris irrevocably changed, numbers become the
enemy. Ivy's grown two inches and gained x pounds, and she'll cut y calories to balance the rapidly fraying
equation. But Ivy's battle with her body is vicious, and healing may mean confronting not only her own
open wounds but also her mother's. Teens will identify with Ivy, a girl grappling with her growing body and
the stifling pressures of a society-and self-demanding nothing short of perfection. Myers' succinct poems
(often no longer than a page), sprawling into surprising shapes and strategically set against ample white
space, nimbly underscore questions of emptiness and control, fluctuation and resilience. More than a
touching debut, this is a surefire coping companion, too.--Briana Shemroske
Shemroske, Briana
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Shemroske, Briana. "This Impossible Light." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 52+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084871/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3db9cace.
Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496084871
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This Impossible Light
Publishers Weekly.
264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p73+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* This Impossible Light
Lily Myers. Philomel, $17.99 (352p) ISBN 9780-399-17372-1
In an exceptional novel in verse, slam poet Myers debuts with a powerful commentary on maternal
inheritance and eating disorders. Ivy, a high school sophomore, is a self-described smart girl who
"understands that/ discipline is success." Since her parents' divorce and her mother's subsequent withdrawal
into herself ("More far-off stares./ More wine./ More silence"), Ivy finds comfort in assuming control where
she can, such as in math: "Numbers keep their promises." When Ivy's need for control moves outside the
classroom, she begins to severely limit her food intake and to exercise excessively. As Ivy's obsession
grows and her body begins to fail, she is forced confront her familial issues and harmful choices in order to
begin her journey back to physical and mental health. Myers makes striking use of the flexibility of free
verse to communicate Ivy's emotions and eventual loss of control. Ivy's relationship with her mother and
her understanding of what she has inherited from her--"the unspoken lessons/ that worm their way under my
skin/ the things I wish I could unlearn"--are particularly absorbing and evocative. Ages 12-up. Agent: Erin
Murphy, Erin Murphy Literary. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"This Impossible Light." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 73+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490319338/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cf810ea0.
Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490319338
Courtesy Penguin Random House
BOOK REVIEW
Awkward Teen Poetry as a Force for Good
Lily Myers’ YA novel ‘This Impossible Light’ examines one young woman’s eating disorder through verse.
By Paul Constant
Wednesday, August 23, 2017 1:30amARTS & CULTUREBOOKS
We’ve all got those notebook pages crammed full of bad poetry skulking somewhere around in our pasts, don’t we? I know I tried to communicate the wretched angst and hormonal discomfort of my teen years in poetry. I filled page after page of three-hole-punched notebook paper with awful, unrhymed poems in a desperate attempt to communicate the hell of my perfectly safe and privileged adolescence to the world. Thankfully, I destroyed all those papers many years ago, but sometimes I can still summon a line to mind, and it invariably makes me cringe.
The ubiquity of those bad poems—the fact that everyone, including those who’d never picked up a book of poetry in their lives, writes poetry in their youth—leads me to conclude that bad poetry must serve some higher biological function. Maybe there’s something to the teenage years that can be communicated only through poetry. Perhaps those skinny columns bedecked with too many adjectives and heavy from way too much emotion are the best way to share the intensity of adolescence. Maybe complete sentences and rigorous formatting aren’t the right tool for the job.
Ravenna author Lily Myers understands that poetry is the right medium for talking about teenage years. Her new young-adult novel, This Impossible Light, is written entirely in verse. And it’s not even one book-length narrative; it’s broken up into a series of small poems, many just one page each. The atmosphere is like stumbling across some teenager’s secret journal, the hidden volume where she keeps all her dankest poetry, then reading it from front to back. The narrative, plain and clear, reads more like a diary than a collection of poetry.
Read the rest of this review in Seattle Weekly’s print edition or online here at Seattle Review of Books. Paul Constant is co-founder of The Seattle Review of Books. Read books coverage at seattlereviewofbooks.com.