The Whispering Wall
BY LISSA KIERNAN
Designer: Elena Etter
Binding: Jacketed Hardcover
ISBN: 9798986369990
List Price: $23.95
Preorder Price: $19.95
Publisher: AIM Higher
Page Count: 126
Publication Date: December 2022
ABOUT
“The poems in Lissa Kiernan’s The Whispering Wall walk a tightrope between worlds—grief and praise, beauty and ruin, revelation and secrets, the sacred and the profane, dark humor and wonder—and, in that daringly exhilarating and very tricky journey create another world that merges opposites, that accepts both the willingness and unwillingness to embrace all the different dimensions of a life intensely lived.
Kiernan deftly weaves her own personal narrative into the lives of other artists (including surrealist artists Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, and Leonora Carrington), historical events, computer systems, mythological figures, and even aerodynamics concepts, so that the collection subtly expands the dimensions of what the self means.”
—Christien Gholson, author, All the Beautiful Dead
Signed jacketed hardcover limited edition available exclusively through AIM Higher. Unsigned copies are also available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com.
DISTINCTIONS
Winner, Homebound Publications Poetry Prize, 2020
Semi-Finalist, Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press), 2020
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Whispering Wall is Lissa Kiernan’s third book. Her previous offering, Glass Needles & Goose Quills, won the Nautilus Book Award for Lyric Prose and the Independent Book Award in the Cross-Genre category. Two Faint Lines in the Violet, her first collection of poetry, was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award as well as the Foreword Indies. Kiernan founded and directs The Poetry Barn, a lending library and creative space for poetry and its sister arts. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley at the entrance to Catskill Park near the Ashokan Reservoir spillway. She volunteers for the Flying Cat Music concert series in Phoenicia, New York and, with her husband, Chris Abramides, is an enthusiastic herder of a fluctuating number of felines. More information can be found at lissakiernan.com.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“Besotted with, weighted with Beauty, The Whispering Wall constructs delicious sonic tangles and brutally candid testimonies. Seductions and menacing of drink, of violence, shadow the speaker’s journey. Guiding all is the gorgeous dreaminess in Kiernan’s voice, pouring into us its alchemies: art itself is the elixir that distracts from, or miraculously surpasses, illusion or myth. A witchy and sardonic wit’s at work, too, in these poems, singing with Stevie Smith, and with Plath. What a great gift of solace and heart this book is.”
– Judith Vollmer, author of THE SOUND BOAT: New and Selected Poems
“Fueled by precise, textured diction, Lissa Kiernan’s compelling collection The Whispering Wall stares down its ghosts. These poems possess a raven wildness. These are poems of vision and verve.”
—Sally Rosen Kindred, author of Where the Wolf
"Elegiac and alive with all five senses, plus whatever sixth sense allows us to perceive the metaphysical mysteries of life and death, Lissa Kiernan's The Whispering Wall limns the mists of grief and memory and delineates the lucidity of having a body."
– Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
AIM Higher is a nonprofit press that publishes works that blur boundaries, negate binaries, interrogate, confound, and delight. We endeavor to open portals into unmapped and magical dimensions, and honor intuition and collaboration.