Join us in celebrating the launch of Lissa Kiernan’s new book of poetry The Whispering Wall!
Free with registration. Celebration to follow.

About the Book:

“Besotted with, weighted with Beauty, The Whispering Wall constructs delicious sonic tangles and brutally candid testimonies. Seductions and menacing of drink, of violence, shadow the speaker’s journey. Guiding all is the gorgeous dreaminess in Kiernan’s voice, pouring into us its alchemies: art itself is the elixir that distracts from, or miraculously surpasses, illusion or myth. A witchy and sardonic wit’s at work, too, in these poems, singing with Stevie Smith, and with Plath. What a great gift of solace and heart this book is.”

– Judith Vollmer, author of THE SOUND BOAT: New and Selected Poems

“Fueled by precise, textured diction, Lissa Kiernan’s compelling collection The Whispering Wall stares down its ghosts. These poems possess a raven wildness. These are poems of vision and verve.”

—Sally Rosen Kindred, author of Where the Wolf

"Elegiac and alive with all five senses, plus whatever sixth sense allows us to perceive the metaphysical mysteries of life and death, Lissa Kiernan's The Whispering Wall limns the mists of grief and memory and delineates the lucidity of having a body." 

– Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“The poems in Lissa Kiernan’s The Whispering Wall walk a tightrope between worlds—grief and praise, beauty and ruin, revelation and secrets, the sacred and the profane, dark humor and wonder—and, in that daringly exhilarating and very tricky journey create another world that merges opposites, that accepts both the willingness and unwillingness to embrace all the different dimensions of a life intensely lived.”

—Christien Gholson, author, All the Beautiful Dead

About the Author

Founding director of The Poetry Barn and AIM Higher, Lissa Kiernan's second poetry collection, The Whispering Wall (2023), won the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and was a semi-finalist for the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. In 2018, her first book of prose, Glass Needles & Goose Quills, won the Nautilus Gold for lyric prose. Her first poetry collection, Two Faint Lines in the Violet, was short-listed for the 2015 Foreword Indies and the Julie Suk Award. She lives in West Hurley with her husband, Chris, and a fluctuating number of felines. More at http://lissakiernan.com

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