But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise

But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise emerges at a time when science is discovering more and more about the mystical particles that make up our universe and our bodies. From tidal forces and prairie burns to ruminations on racial identity while standing at the foot of Mount Rushmore, these poems chart a travelogue through mental and physical landscapes and suggest that place, time, love, and bodies are all shifts in the “undulate cosmos.” Straddling the lyrical and experimental, these poems conjure and connect the cosmological, the carnal, and the personal in a country—and a universe—that is gobbling itself into oblivion. But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise is in love with the universe of language—its forms, its sounds, and even its static.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram has been a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship winner, a Cave Canem fellow, and a writer-in-residence at the Montana Artists’ Refuge. Her poetry has appeared in the Harvard Review, the Mid-American Review, the Indiana Review, and other journals. She received second place in Narrative Magazine’s poetry contest and has won Gulf Coast Magazine’s Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. Bertram is a graduate of the writing programs at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College. Her first book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise, won Red Hen Press’s 2010 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, judged by Claudia Rankine.