Celeste Lipkes is a writer and psychiatrist residing in Asheville, North Carolina. Prior to medical school, she received an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia.
Request Academic Copy
Please copy the ISBN for submitting review copy form
Description
Rabbit sonnet mel?lif?er?ous Moon Face Anatomy Lab Eve Miscarries Dove ne?pen?thes Instructions for My Lover La Brea Tar Pits cousin A Kite Addresses Benjamin Franklin Hemicorporectomy a pair of impossible objects cam?pa?nol?o?gy Hospital through a Teleidoscope Snail Escape infusion room praise song al?bes?cent two small fish Alphekka Acknowledgments Notes
In the breathtaking 'escape room' of Celeste Lipkes's Radium Girl, our ardent guide dons, by turns, the snow-flaked robe of patient, the white coat of physician, the lustrous cape of magician. The word 'magic' is rooted in the PIE 'magh to be able, to have power and in this radiant debut, body and mystery exchange their secrets about what can and cannot be controlled in illness, in love, and in the salvific art of poetry itself." - Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and Paradise Close: A Novel "Celeste Lipkes, poet and clinical psychiatrist, is Dr. Oliver Sacks and Stevie Smith rolled into one. With perspicacity, her luminous first book meditates on many odd juxtapositions including Houdini and medical school, Crohn's disease and love. Dividing her idiosyncratic lyrics into four sections Rabbit, Dove, Hemicorporectomy, and Escape Radium Girl brings us close to a young speaker under pressure to honor the Hippocratic oath and make her way in the world. Annie Dillard said poets to be poets should study something else. Lipkes did, to great success: by the last page, her poetry radiates with talent, acuity, and originality." - Spencer Reece, author of The Clerk's Tale and The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet's Memoir