Books
History of Gone
Veliz Books, 2018
Shortlisted for the 2016 Sexton Poetry Prize; Finalist for the Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry.
History of Goneis a collection of poems inspired by the life and unsolved disappearance of Barbara Newhall Follett, a once-famous child prodigy writer who disappeared at the age of 25 in 1939.
The poems in the book address issues of genius and erasure; childhood and feminism; art and love and history. Absence beats with presence in this imagined memoir of a forgotten life. Questions of autonomy, creativity and significance lurk inside its mouth music. What is it to be extraordinary, the book asks? What does it take to be oneself?
Praise for History of Gone
“A daring conceptual feat of reanimated biography, History of Gone arrives … drenched in lyric imagination…. Schmeidler’s rich lexicons frame intimate interior geographies… all the while replaying the stolen reel of a forgotten life. … these poems invite charged questions about autonomy, creativity, and self-effacement… A cautionary tale of the erasures of domesticity, a vocational fable, an inside-out bildungsroman, this book… is nothing short of levitation.”
—BK Fischer, author of Radioapocrypha
“In these smart and haunting poems, rich with human vulnerability and wit, Lynn Schmeidler playfully explores the nature of genius, love and celebrity against the backdrop of a mysterious disappearance. Desire and risk are given fresh heat and intimacy as the pursuit becomes personal. He was dress and watch / they were travel. You are wait like a ceiling / full of cracks. These poems weave, reverse and reveal longings for reinvention we didn’t even know we had.”
—Kim Garcia, author of DRONE and The Brighter House
“Schmeidler understands the slippery masks of the intellect and imagination. This book, made up of distinctive and perceptive lyrics, surreal list poems, evasively truthful Q&As, and found poems, ends in memoriam with an erasure. Open the book, and you will always find her.”
—Amy Holman, author of Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window and Wait For Me, I’m Gone
Wrack Lines
Grayson Books, 2017
Finalist for the Comstock Review Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest; Finalist for the Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize.
Wrack Lines is a chapbook of poems on the related subjects of infatuation, unrequited love, idealization, longing, projection and lust.
Praise for Wrack Lines
“In these poems—heartbreaking, wildly inventive, wise and innocent by turns—[Schmeidler] conjures the world of unrequited love.… Wrack Lines is full of force and untamable—let it lift you. When it sets you back down, the world will seem just barely recognizable and haunting in its beauty.”
— Gillian Cummings, author of My Dim Aviary
“Lynn Schmeidler is a rare poet who deftly straddles two camps of contemporary lyric poetry. Well-versed at lexical play and the leap as well as clear metaphor and imagery, … Schmeidler offers us a feminist handbook of one-sided yearning.”
— Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift
Curiouser & Curiouser
Grayson Books, 2013
Winner of the Grayson Books Chapbook Prize.
Curiouser & Curiouser is a chapbook of poems exploring selfhood and identity through the lens of rare neurological disorders.
Praise for Curiouser & Curiouser
“Composed of equal parts curiosity, compassion, and verve, … these poems evoke the alternately offbeat, poignant, droll, and terrifying circumstances of people whose perceptions are irrevocably askew—a patient whose hands take on a life of their own, another who believes her husband was replaced by a double, another who can perceive objects but not motion… In the heady ride through these lines, we are led to witness the estrangements and refractions that afflict, and enrapture, us all.”
— BK Fischer, author of Mutiny Gallery, winner of the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize
“…follows up on the promise of neurology’s intrigue with a deft handle on the mysteries and miracles of selfhood and identity…ranges widely yet fires just the right neurons in all the right regions of the brain.”
— Brian Clements
“…delightfully absurd, even as it explores tragic brain conditions.”
— Laura Madeline Wiseman, author of An Apparently Impossible Adventure (BlazeVOX)