Lucky Witness

One senses that Kathleen Lynch -- in her brilliant, sometimes devastating book -- intends her title to be read un-ironically. As in Ingmar Bergman films, the poems cast a light on various darknesses that in their exposures, their witnessing, are the essential cries and whispers of poetry. In "Throes," she says, "The saint flung himself / into a thorn bush to incur / wounds worthy of his joy." Lynch's poems have that kind of complexity, and seem to know "We need a face / to express the hidden / face." When that face is found, as it often is in these poems, it contains a voice, which can make us smile as well as wince at life's absurdities.

About the Author

Kathleen Lynch's first book, Hinge, won The Black Zinnias Poetry Book Award. Her chapbooks include How to Build and Owl and Alterations of Rising, both in the Select Poets Series from Small Poetry Press; No Spring Chicken, winner of the White Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Prize; and Kathleen Lynch Greatest Hits: 1985-2001 in the Pudding House Press Greatest Hits Series. Her poem, "Abracadabra", won a 2018 Pushcart Prize. Lynch won the 2019 Genosko Flash Fiction Award first prize. Kathleen lives in Sacramento, California.