Purchase: Poems

Purchase is for those who are grieving, who feel frightened by the world’s meanness, who are solitary. It is for those who, even in the midst of mourning, find themselves distracted from despair by the natural world. It is for everyone looking to find comfort and understanding. From a hidden river in upstate New York to a massive flood in Kentucky, currents of all strengths run through these poems, taking the reader through grief, estrangement, and the too-often unseen interiority of Black women, landing at a new perspective, the light of faith dawning.

About the Author :
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of ] Open Interval [, a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize, and Black Swan, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. She has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, and the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts.

Review :
Van Clief-Stefanon reaches towards the numinous. Praise for ] Open Interval [: What joy to enter the universe Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon wills into being. In ]Open Interval[ Jimi Hendrix, Robert Hass, Rilke, Bearden, John Goodricke, blues, desire, longing, supernovas, and more are all held together with lyrical daring and fierce imagination. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon invents a new world to reveal to us the secret workings of the old. ‘Teach the sonnet’s a cell’ says the speaker in one of Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s compelling new poems, as she prepares to teach poetry to inmates at a New York State prison, ‘now try to escape–’. This poet’s astute and various formal choices perform exactly that work, containing the poem then constructing an opportunity for the splendidly intelligent maker of these artful forms to step into the light. ] Open Interval [ not only confirms the promise of Van Clief-Stefanon’s first book but takes her work to startling new heights. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon asserts early in ] Open Interval [ that ‘Poise begins here: / in cinders, in rhyme, in splintering beauty into this / and this—:’ and the volume’s inventive splintering becomes luminous exploration of the body—human and celestial. Part of its concern ‘the crushing need / for form’ in intricate renavigations of the personal and historical, the mythic and scientific, the book’s shape is finally more lyric constellation than traditional collection, the poems themselves variable stars, beautifully intense, pulsing.