Lissa Kiernan - The Whispering Wall

NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired October 5th, 2022) featuring award-winning poet Lissa Kiernan, who will read from and discuss her most recent poetry collection, The Whispering Wall.  Planet Poet’s Poet-At-Large, Pamela Manché Pearce, also joins us on the show.  The Whispering Wall, Lissa Kiernan’s second full-length poetry collection, won the 2020 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and was a semi-finalist for Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. Her previous books are Glass Needles & Goose Quills, winner of the Nautilus Gold for lyric prose, and Two Faint Lines in the Violet, finalist for the Julie Suk Award and IndieFab Award. She received her MFA at Stonecoast and holds an MA in Media Arts from The New School. She founded and directs The Poetry Barn, a pollinator habitat for poetry in the Catskills, and AIM Higher, a nonprofit organization dedicated to elevating women artists. She volunteers with Flying Cat Music and, with her husband, Chris Abramides, is an enthusiastic herder of a fluctuating number of felines. lissakiernan.com “Besotted with, weighted with Beauty, The Whispering Wall constructs delicious sonic tangles and brutally candid testimonies. Kiernan’s lyric recording of multiple losses—of father, fertility, beloved natural places, sheer breathing spaces destroyed by human encroachment—provides the elegant architecture guiding each poem. Seductions and menacing of drink, of violence, shadow the speaker’s journey. Guiding all is the gorgeous dreaminess in Kiernan’s voice, pouring into us its alchemies: art itself is the elixir that distracts from, or miraculously surpasses, illusion or myth. A witchy and sardonic wit’s at work, too, in these poems, singing with Stevie Smith, and with Plath. What a great gift of solace and heart this book is.”—Judith Vollmer, author of The Sound Boat: New and Selected Poems “Elegiac and alive with all five senses, plus whatever sixth sense allows us to perceive the metaphysical mysteries of life and death, Lissa Kiernan’s The Whispering Wall limns the mists of grief and memory and delineates the lucidity of having a body.”—Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey   “...Kiernan deftly weaves her own personal narrative into the lives of other artists (including Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, and Leonora Carrington), historical events, computer systems, mythological figures, and even aerodynamics concepts, so that the collection subtly expands the dimensions of what the self means... “—Christien Gholson, author of All the Beautiful Dead and winner of The Bitter Oleander Press Library Of Poetry Book Award Yours in Radio, Sharon