Poetry. "When you pick up PINK &amp; HOT PINK HABITAT go directly to the table of contents, look at the titles there, you want to read the poems called by these names, then go to the first poem, being afraid is a good thing, then go to 'Watch the Village,' and then find the poem where it's written 'we do not need a / country. We can destroy ourselves here.' Somewhere in these pages Lyalin writes, 'I start the time machine.' Well, she does, and the heart machine and the brain machine, her poems can go anywhere, and they choose to go where it matters. These poems are gorgeous, surprising, full of necessary knowledge and feeling."—Dara Wier "Natalie Lyalin's poems are animated by an urgent, slightly deranged whisper. In the dead of night, when the inane games have finally ended and the 'normal' kids are all asleep in their bunks, she calls over to you (Are you awake? Can you hear?). She's asking you to shake off your sleeping bag and go out into that pink and hot pink habitat to commune with the headless boy birds, the beaver humans, and the ghost of Otto Frank. I suggest you do it."—Travis Nichols "In PINK &amp; HOT PINK HABITAT, Natalie Lyalin makes heat. The pages and words rub at each other to make something more than fire, more like a bomb, more like a thousand bombs going off at once. This poet is more than bombmaker though. She herself is the bomb she constructs and sets off upon your reading. In these poems, Lyalin enacts the old work of Flaubert that 'The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.' When you are done with this book, your own life is more than bombed out. It is more than a 'dusty' 'gem' sitting in front of you because '[y]our family is in flight.' You yourself are transformed into a bird rising out of the fire, a 'Miniature Life of a Raven,' where Lyalin has made 'stars for your teeth,' where your old ideas are nothing more than 'ancient dust on velvet.'"—Dorothea Lasky

Pink & Hot Pink Habitat

Literature & Fiction

Lyalin, Natalie

Poetry

Coconut Books

Poetry. Natalie Lyalin's second book of poems concerns itself with the process of geographic and familial dislocation. The poems move from village to city to a window from which the speaker witnesses brief atrocities and occasional delights: a peasant starts a revolution; a neighbor abuses his wife. Space and time are folded and refolded, and time travel is possible. Generations are gathered across oceans and continents. Their stories are braided together, slightly exalted, somewhat mourned in a kind of melancholia. Lyalin attempts a beautification of brutality that is only possible in retrospect. "Whether they threaten or offer tenderness, her poems declare themselves in strange, flat phrases, as if unaware of how much beauty and destruction they contain, until some moment of recognition occurs and they suddenly must exclaim, 'Coffins are so tiny after dark!' This book is an unpredictable delight, written in the fantastic English of a poet who can see the language for all its gaps and glamour."—Heather Christle

Blood Makes Me Faint but I Go for It

Ugly Duckling Presse

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lyalin, Natalie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lyalin, Natalie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lyalin, Natalie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pink & Hot Pink Habitat

Blood Makes Me Faint but I Go for It