If a Dolphin

If a Dolphin

$20.00

By Lindsay Remee Ahl

“I have a cavalcade of lifetimes like a hundred candles in my mind…” writes Ahl. Be prepared to join her in multiple perspectives and co-existing realities. Ahl’s writing is full of grace, potency and out-of-the-box surprise. Her poems are narrated by a girl drowned in a lake who continues to age in the afterlife and is capable of time travel, by the lifeguard who could not save her, by dolphins, World War II spies and occasionally by Ahl herself. The poetic microbiome of Ahl’s mind is boundless. The collection reflects her ability to question time, place, the afterlife, and the fiction we adhere to that there is such a thing as an individual. Ahl’s premise is not based on mysticism as much as particle physics. Yet the poems in If a Dolphin read like a wild Tibetan Bardo journey, shattering and enriching.—Joanne Dominique Dwyer, author of Belle Laide

PRE-ORDERS ONLY AT THIS TIME. RELEASE DATE IS MARCH 15.

NOTE: Please understand if you purchase the book now, you will not receive it until March. Thanks!

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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

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