Sails the Wind Left Behind
Alessandra Lynch
In her first collection, Alessandra Lynch deftly combines the surreal and the lyric into a striking and confident whole. At times witty, at times dreamlike, the poems revel in dense Symbolist-like imagery, juxtaposition, wordplay and rhyme. By refusing a certain kind of transparency—direct statement and traditional allusion—Lynch excavates the shadowy region of the psyche. From a rich profusion of images emerge themes of unrealized desire, and the ways in which we may fail to be present in our own lives or to others. The poems seek to resolve these themes, suggesting how words, in memorializing the disorientations of life, reorient us; that it is in the tokens and monuments of our failed desires, broken promises—“Sails the wind left behind”—that we are able to find ourselves.
“These poems do the remarkable job of making contemporary American poetry feel new again. Lynch takes risks at every turn, trying out new shapes in the mouth, flirting with narrative . . . The poems operate at dizzying heights, and Lynch is so good she convinces the reader to climb just as high.”
—Ploughshares
"Alessandra Lynch possesses one of the most truly poetic imaginations I have ever
encountered. Her metaphors slide seamlessly one into another and the logic of her illogic
is so lucid I feel, reading her, like I’ve entered a new, a delightful land. This is
a brilliant debut."
—Thomas Lux
"Daring, disarming Alessandra Lynch is like a golden wind. She aims to envelope a reader in gusts of poems, transparent, yet mysterious. Lynch has much more than a story to tell—she has muses to consort with and animal identities to assume. Forget the homespun and the plainspoken. Here is poetry you can lose yourself in, be thrilled about, perplexed over, surprised and satisfied inside."
—Molly Peacock
about the author
Alessandra Lynch was raised North of New York City. She holds a BA from
Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her
poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Hayden's Ferry Review,
Ploughshares, Quarterly West, and other journals. Currently, she is living in the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania, working on her second collection of poetry, and teaching creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.
Author photo by Gillian Quandt
