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.
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"Nothing in American verse is quite like it. It is the poetry of the universe of ten-thousand things."
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"A flawlessly written book of poems, powerful and self-contained in its sounds and its silences."
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"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