The Hermit

Poetry. THE HERMIT is a catalog of thoughts concerning art and experience. Layering fragments of dreams, lists, games, conversations, poems, and notebooks, Lucy Ives offers an intimate look into one writer’s practice–The worst is my imagination: lushly underscoring everything.

Imagine if all you had was phenomenology, and then that faded, making every legibility left behind look like scare quotes around the word thought. Lucy Ives is smart in that heart-breaking way that can make a spare, suspicious, elegant work of anti-poetry out of the silent treatment between ideas and those who have them. ‘You cannot win, ’ says THE HERMIT, in that cognitive territory unoccupied by ease.–Anne Boyer

Stray thoughts are the protagonists of THE HERMIT–they might be the aftereffects of intense focus, yet come across as decidedly eccentric in their resistance to systems (i.e. genre) that might dull their prismatic luminescence. Here they deliver proof of parataxis’s poiesis. Ives’s exquisite take on ellipsis as realism is a dream, as both vision and something that fully satisfies a wish.–Monica de la Torre