About Lindsay Remee Ahl
Lindsay Remee Ahl is the author of a novel, Desire, and two chapbooks, The Mythographic Abyss and Delphi. Her fiction and poetry have been published in the New England Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Georgia Review, BOMB Magazine, Hotel Amerika, Poetry Daily, and many others.
Praise for If a Dolphin
In Lindsay Ahl’s poems everything morphs and moves and everything dark is paired with something bright. When a garbage truck passes, “bits of paper fly out all around in the evening light.” A lake’s color “is ever-changing: tree-green, azure-grey, ice-blue” as “swimmers disappear into shade.” Holes open into water, present disappears into past, and sometimes reading If a Dolphin can feel like drowning—but that’s okay because in this book, drowning and surviving go hand in hand. The effect is of spending time in a world simultaneously dreamed and tremendously real—a disconcerting and beautiful place to live.—Daisy Fried, author of My Destination
Call it time-travel, call it Dante’s Inferno with dolphins as Virgil. Walter Benjamin, with his black suitcase of writing (“history as a dream made of details”) makes an appearance, as do gryphons bursting into flight from ramparts and skyscrapers. The speaker returns to the drowning of a girl, and this girl becomes a woman who moves through wars, cities, and seas. What a gorgeous epistemology of love’s power, set against the tragedies of the human-made world. In one of the final, short poems, “The Last Thing,” Ahl writes “What world?/Only a feeling,/not language.//A bowing down.”—Connie Voisine, author of The Bower
