Lamb

Winner of the 2006 Perugia Press Prize, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, Lamb will take your breath away. With electric imagery, Frannie Lindsay writes about the devotion that binds together a family in pain. When love is uncertain, how does caretaking erode? How does it continue? Each poem in Lamb is a small quest for a right answer, and for a reconciliation between the speaker and her mother and father, and within her body. Ellen Bass calls these poems “hymns of praise for the love we are able to wrest from our flawed lives.” Throughout the poems, animals serve as expressions of vulnerability and mortality; they are “hapless objects” whose unconditional loyalty, free of familial obligation, teaches the necessary lessons about tenderness and atonement. By caring for animals and then her aging parents, the speaker ultimately releases herself, stepping away from the power her parents hold over her: not in forgiveness, but in a solemn declaration of freedom. Lamb is a deft and memorable portrait of girlhood and aging.