Word Poems, by Hannah Lamb-Vines

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In Word Poems, Hannah Lamb-Vines tests the distance between language and what it attempts to contain. Moving through sex, work, illness, friendship, memory, political despair, and the price of being alive, their poems speak to language’s inadequacy to describe the experiences it claims to. Definitions fracture into etymologies, memories interrupt arguments, and the body keeps insisting on what language cannot quite hold: breath, sweat, pain, pleasure, exhaustion, and airplane cabins.

At once restless, funny, intimate, and politically alert, Word Poems follows language until it begins to come apart. The poems illustrate how work, technology, money, medicine, desire, and inherited ideas of how one understands themselves and the world they inhabit collide, converge, and transform when trapped on the page. But beneath skepticism, words are a persistent desire to communicate—to say it, interrupt, and to be heard. If language is insufficient, these poems ask what might happen when we keep speaking anyway. Each poem begins from the possibility that words have failed and goes on to find more, to try again. What emerges is less a search for a new definition than for another way of speaking: language as interruption, refusal, touch, and eventually something that might be planted anew. If these are just words, Lamb-Vines asks what they might still be capable of changing.

Hannah Lamb-Vines lives in Berkeley, California. They have degrees in writing from The New School and California College of the Arts. Their work can be found in print in The Bennington Review, Columbia Journal, and Moral Crema, and online at HAD, Full Stop, Ceasura, Peach Mag, shit wonder, and other literary websites. Two microchaps, carnal delights and STONE WORLD, are available from Ghost City Press.