Poetry. "Lauren Russell casts a sharp eye on the urban landscape around her, carving profiles and cutting out silhouettes from real experience. The strongest influences on her are the people she deals with directly—lovers, roommates, oglers from the subway, fellow patients, pets. 'The lover, as artifact, is constant as long as the jewelry remains broken,' she writes, dismantling her attachments to fluster assertions of overarching facts. Russell favors a singing absence, where each detail is a transitional truth, and each word a temporary home. 'It may be known that she allowed a dismantling.'"—Edmund Berrigan

"Lauren Russell's poems remind us what authenticity might mean and be. They are full of 'the possibilities of grief" and "insubordinate frizzle.' Simultaneously raw and crafted, these poems bubble and boil with life."—Joanna Fuhrman

Author City: PITTSBURGH, PA USA

Lauren Russell is the author of one previous chapbook, The Empty-Handed Messenger (Goodbye Better, 2009). Her poems and reviews have appeared in various places, including ELEVEN ELEVEN, The Poetry Project Newsletter, HARP & ALTAR, Lyre Lyre, Boog City, The Recluse, and VAN GOGH'S EAR. She is an M.F.A. student at the University of Pittsburgh and counts the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, AmeriCorps*NCCC, and Goddard College among her alma maters.