Reviews!

We're getting close to the publication date of my chapbook, The Breakdown Atlas, and the pre-release reviews are in!  I want to send out my warmest thanks to Sascha Feinstein, Maureen Sherbondy, and Norma Ketzis Bernstock for their time and careful reading of my work~I feel humbled to have been reviewed by these accomplished and talented poets, and I'm quite honored (and psyched!) to have their public endorsement.  Without further ado, here are their seriously cool reviews:  

“Lauren Tivey’s poems confront the reader’s body like shots of tequila—if, that is, the reader has a knowledge of its bite and substance, and knows how to temper the hits with the citrus of lime and the truth of salt.  She shies away from nothing, yet, as though you’ve been friends a long time and have met regularly at the bar, she encourages you to experience tough realities. But here’s the kicker:  These poems will drink you under the table.  You may stagger home, but they’re always ready for last call.”

~Sascha Feinstein, Misterioso and Black Pearls

“Lauren Tivey’s ‘animal-tough’ poems about relationships are stunning, enticing, and brutally honest. The Breakdown Atlas & other poems kicks readers in the gut over and over again, but somehow manages to leave them with a sense of hope in spite of their ‘broken, journeyed bodies’.  I absolutely loved this book!”

~Maureen Sherbondy, Weary Blues and Scar Girl

“With raw energy and in-your-face language, Lauren Tivey's The Breakdown Atlas is a wild journey that begins with the harsh reality of ‘a rotting carcass’ of a marriage.  Through her poems we experience the life of a newly independent woman, feel the pain of a lover's breakdown, and desperation in a Hong Kong hooker hotel.  She expresses a mother's deep love for her distant daughter, for whom she'll pick ‘bouquets of devotion and remorse’.  Her poetry can be raunchy, as in ‘satyrs copulating with witches’; titillating, like ‘a Geisha, opening the flower of her mouth’; yet tender, as she describes ‘the wind chime of your laughter’. Lauren Tivey's poems left me breathless, with a desire to live through her wild ride again and again. She writes in one poem that ‘the kettle screeched holy hell’, and so does her poetry!"

~Norma Ketzis Bernstock, Don't Write a Poem for Me After I'm Dead

Awesome, no?  Strangely craving tequila, here...