The Lyme Letters: Poems(Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry)

The Lyme Letters is epistolary verse that spells out a memoir. R, a non-binary femme character, narrates their experience of disease and recovery through recurrent letters to doctors, pets, family members, lovers, and a "Master." R, in letter form and repurposed religious texts, also explores the paradoxical experiences of queer non-reproductivity, chronic illness and disability, and the healing that can be found in the liminal spaces between.

About the Author :
C. R. Grimmer, who also goes by Chelsea Grimmer and uses she/her and they/them pronouns interchangeably, is a poet, scholar, and Lecturer and Assistant Director of Digital Pedagogy in the Department of English at the University of Washington (UW) Seattle and Bothell campuses. They received their Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies at the UW with support from The Simpson Center for the Humanities' Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Public Humanities Fellowship. Grimmer created and hosts The Poetry Vlog (TPV): a YouTube and Podcast Teaching Channel dedicated to social justice coalitions through arts dialogue. Grimmer's poems and published articles can be found in numerous poetry and literary journals. Their chapbook O-(ezekiel's wife) is available from GASHER Journal and Press. For more information, visit crgrimmer.com.

Review :
"The Lyme Letters thrums with the propulsive imperatives of weighted obligations, nimble insights, and precise observations. Seeded with sonic portents and remarkable lyrical textures, this book is spun through with aptitude and integrity." -Laura Da', author of Instruments of the True Measure "C. R. Grimmer's world of address is fusing utterance, lyric, and amendments, allowing us into language that thinks through the conditions of being in illness and duration. Her prophetic wording into those life-seams of impermeability let us fall into her step, her grace of deep reckoning." - Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence "An extraordinary collection of poems dedicated to the hard work of healing, and the impact of being surrounded by a caring community. In the end, help from others is to help ourselves for "a story about where to put / my brain & feel my body speak into it." The poet C. R. Grimmer fills our every thought after reading, adjusting us to a larger lens on the world." - C. A. Conrad, author of The Book of Frank "In the depths of this plague year, C. R. Grimmer reminds us that plagues and prohibitions will always be with us, as will exuberance, as will animal companionship. The product of astonishingly deep reading, listening, and thinking, The Lyme Letters charts an unruly garden of queer jouissance, self-discovery, and filigrees of connection all the more worth cherishing for their fragility." - John Beer, author of The Waste Land and Other Poems "The Lyme Letters is a correspondence between bodies both inhabited and desired, as full and vital as the spaces where river water breaks against stones, churning with life. There is an effervescence to this poetry that replenishes the imagination and revitalizes language in extraordinary ways." - D. A. Powell, author of Chronic "In The Lyme Letters, C. R. Grimmer maps the journey from the asymmetric structures of belief, what it means to believe without being believed, to a delimited freedom." - Tyrone Williams, author of Adventures of Pi "Attuned to a history of falsified remedies and fictions of recovery, Grimmer's poems hold a faithful ear out and in and up for a verve as verified and numinous as the speaker's own literacy of loss." - Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler