She is our storytelling Mary Shelley on Lake Geneva in the year of no summer.” -Stephanie Dickinson, author of Blue Swan, Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries Reptiles poured away, flowers were devastated, and the woman grew full and empty with her own painful truths. No one has expressed the unnatural so naturally as the poet in Come Closer, her vision is cerebral and visceral and somewhere on a continuum between pleasure and horror. Blauner, the 21st century alchemist, takes the unpromising base metals of our everyday and spins them into literary gold. The commonplace is altered to reveal its true nature the apartment becomes not a place of refuge but the setting for speculative transformations. We are told in the opening lines There’s something wrong with the city: the streets I need for an appointment have changed the florist shop leaps to the top of a tall building. Possessing an unrivaled imagination, Laurie Blauner transports us to cities that you recognize vaguely as if retrieved from that sinuous space between waking and sleeping. You can call these succinct yet lyrically sophisticated tales where it rains without raining, where birds open themselves like books, and your own heart can bite you meditations, auguries, revelations, or morality plays. “COME CLOSER, Laurie Blauner’s new collection of delicately wrought fables invites the reader into a delirium where unfamiliar and familiar realities combine. See our wiki for past AMAs.Winner of the 11th Annual Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Award for 2022.

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