Playing and gliding from acrostics to sonnets to maps, these compassionate, cerebral, and irreverent poems plainly recognize the larger and potentially escapable oppressive systems that dominate all of our lives by narrating the exhaustion that comes from living under constraining systems of relentless extraction, systems whose powers fracture all attempts at genuine love and intimacy.
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of several books. Travesty Generator was a National Book Award longlist, and winner of the 2018 Noemi Press Poetry Prize. Bertram is a 2014 recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship, and holds degrees in creative writing from the University of Utah where they are the current managing editor of Quarterly West; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Carnegie Mellon University. They are currently a Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellow at Ithaca College, where they teach creative writing.