There’s furious beauty and inventive, hard-driving music (“not always blossomsweet but breathbrute”) to be found in Heat, Sob, Lily. The scrupulous way Kristina Andersson Bicher maps a woman’s reality, italicizing female savvy and defiance, in her galvanizing lyric bulletins brings to mind the lightning-fierce, self-mythologizing Sylvia Plath of “Lady Lazarus” and the on-fire early poems of Margaret Atwood, but Andersson Bicher is indeed her own resilient X-ray engineer and lucid magician of 21st-century truthtelling. A riveting book!
—Cyrus Cassells, author of Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?

“The doors / to the world are alarmed,” and ever since reading Kristina Andersson Bicher’s Heat, Sob, Lily, I keep expecting the world around me to klaxon, to become more exciting, scary and vibrant. I find myself repeating, “love is a dark leaf out of reach” as I curl with “hungers like roots through stone.” These impressionistic, musical poems dance with the fragment as they hope and harrow and “say wild wooded / things rattling the leaf bin.” This book invites us to journey through childhood, seduction and lust, marriage and divorce, parenthood, illness and loss, arriving, gloriously, to utter “there should be snow bees…that come out in winter, only.” So stop reading this blurb, “put down / your fruit glosses and curling wands, pick up that pipe wrench” and read poems that staple their kisses upon you, while they light “the petite torches / to see where the wind comes from.” Heat, Sob, Lily is a profound, dazzling and powerful book.
—Christopher Citro, author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun

Two couplets, in separate poems, mark the poles of Kristina Andersson Bicher’s Heat, Sob, Lily. First “it was unbearable until it wasn’t / it was impossible until it wasn’t” tells of the agony and helplessness a mother feels facing extreme circumstances. Then “Oaths I swore were oaken. But see, I love my men / broke open” explores the complications of desire. This is a book full of falls and slides: a set of keys into snow, a dog into a basement, the infant Jesus from heaven, and, of course, from innocence into experience. The poems possess startling candor and enormous subtlety. Finally we are told  “I will not    give up on you on you I will not / give up on you     and it was a voice     I had never / heard.” This voice is the mother to the child, the Divine to the speaker, any of us to ourselves.
—Kathleen Ossip, author of July

Heat, Sob, Lily
by Kristina Andersson Bicher
$21.95, paperback, 106 pp
ISBN-13:  978-1-952335-90-7

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