PRESALE - Spree - poems by Lily Herman

BRUISER ZINE 008: SPREE, a collection of poems by Baltimore's Lily Herman.

“When in your last seconds before sleep faces come near and recede, Lily Herman's poems are there too, reminding you these are not hauntings of those we've lost or yet to meet. They are possible shapes of the real, and the real only happens because you surrender to a mutual force of co-creation, because you "love so much / that you enter a chosen/ anonymity, a reverse ceremony/ where you give your name back." Such dissolution is terrifying, but Herman's lights are tender lights, and they show the way.”
–Farid Matuk, author of Moon Mirrored Indivisible

“Lily Herman’s Spree is the best kind of sad time you can have in poems.
She knows there’s no closure to be had from a grief like this in living
or writing, only opening and opening, and reconfigurations of attitude
and intelligence and beauty and language. This book is true.”
–Ander Monson, author of Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession

“In Spree, embrace Herman’s sadness and rage as they gallop together in the direction of Catonsville. Ask if God is in symbolism, or literally written on signs passed. Hurt through absence as if an explanation can be found for loss. But, as Herman writes, these can’t be a fortress: “Fighting the wind / is just another way / of living with it.” Sometimes we must submit to the demands of surrender. Spree exists in the convergence of loss and love, how that mess is a way our impermanent souls pass through. You will want to return again and again to the way Herman allows these multiple paths to exist.”
–Tracy Dimond, author of Emotion Industry