The Blessing of Dark Water

The Blessing of Dark Water

Lyons's debut, The Blessing of Dark Water, highlights the exquisite pain and terrible happiness of mental illness by invoking the voice and perspective of American artist, Walter Inglis Anderson, who struggled with bipolar depression and psychotic episodes. These poems grapple with the suffering and secrecy of "invisible" illness, and the aching struggle for a simple human connection within the complexities. “Lyon’s humble and empathetic poems are wrought with tangible emotion.” — Publishers Weekly “…Lyons shows us the way that history, its violence, and its upheavals are carried with us, in the words we use.” — The Literary Review “This elegant sequence by Elizabeth Lyons floats and scares, is wife and stranger, is transformation and wish of a poet who has disappeared into the actual life of one Walter Anderson—painter, potter, sculptor—who also speaks here, taking his skiff into the bayou when his troubled manic states hit. But this is 70-some years later, his mind and work rock-bottomed and re-dreamt through this remarkable series: epic, lyric, a kind of dizzy and exact ars poetica in the process.” — Marianne Boruch “In this essential debut collection, Elizabeth Lyons takes us on a journey through the dark waters of mental illness. We are told ‘there is a scale to rate this devastation,’ but even as we traverse this harrowing landscape, there is ‘beauty too:/ the creature/ sliding through the swamp.’ These poems are infused with contradiction: discovery and pain, blood and healing. Ultimately,  The Blessing of Dark Water  is wrenching in its investigation of the artistic urge as tempered by the transformative power of suffering.” — Amy Quan Barry Elizabeth Lyons holds an MFA from Purdue University and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Indiana Review, New South, and Salt Hill . A recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Vermont Studio Center, the I-Park Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, she lives in Houston, TX.