About Naomi Mulvihill
Naomi Mulvihill was a Margaret Murphy endowed fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Her chapbook, We All Might Be (Factory Hollow Press) was awarded the 2022 Tomaž Šalamun Prize Editor’s Choice Selection. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Salamander, Cimarron, West Branch and others, and featured in Verse Daily. She is a veteran bilingual teacher in the Boston Public Schools.
Praise for The Knife Thrower’s Girl
Once in a while, a new poetry collection jumps out, compelling the reader’s attention from the first poem. The Knife Thrower’s Girl is that book. With lapidary precision, elegance, and beauty, and by focusing her laser-sharp curiosity on the world’s complexity, Naomi Mulvihill arrives at a hard-won awareness of what living thoughtfully and fully means. Here are investigations of words, the animate and inanimate world around us, our inmost subconscious assumptions, and the received givens that underpin experience and sometimes determine choice. This is a book of and for our times. Follow Mulvihill’s always unsentimental explorations: The Knife Thrower’s Girl will take you to an astonishing wisdom.
—Andrea Carter Brown, author of September 12, Series Editor for the Washington Prize
No one writes like Naomi Mulvihill. The Knife Thrower’s Girl is genius, refined over decades: each word pins her subjects a centimeter from their jugular vein. There’s danger in her art saved by enormous compassion and precision. Unforgettable. Arresting. Vibrant. Ecstatic. Meditative. A poem about a bird flying towards a plate glass window leads to the leap: “When I was pregnant I thought, how / can I save this child from myself?” Perhaps it’s true that poetry is the most brutal and exacting art.
—Spencer Reece, author of The Clerk’s Tale
One beautiful—and frightening—thing about this collection is that the poet is somehow always well-situated enough to be, simultaneously, the witness and the conjurer. As we move through the poems, it’s hard not to feel on edge, even as the poet’s voice lulls with its strangeness and the language pulls us in with its precision. Naomi Mulvihill has a rare honesty in poetry—there’s no need to show off, no stretching for insights, no fumbling to impress. Because of that purity, The Knife Thrower’s Girl has the power to overwhelm: “I’m at the age / when nothing / becomes a playmate.” What a welcome, uniquely unnerving sensation it is to read this book. If our imaginations are ever in danger of atrophy, Mulvihill can help us wonder again. What would it say about us were we to have no more playmates? What essential human momentousness will we have lost?
—Duy Đoàn, author of We Play a Game
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