Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, BOOK of POTIONS captures a woman caught in the middle of life. Out of a desperation to free herself, she hits upon a literary form that expresses and interrogates all the places between. By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these intense short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.
"Nothing in American verse is quite like it. It is the poetry of the universe of ten-thousand things."
"A flawlessly written book of poems, powerful and self-contained in its sounds and its silences."
"Lauren K. Watel has profoundly altered my sense of what a poem can do and be. I have not read so brilliant, so transformative and technically masterful a book of poems in years."
- Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road
- Vijay Seshadri, author of That Was Now, This Is Then and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
- Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy