HERMIT (Song Cave) - Softcover

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."—Mónica de la Torre

Lucy Ives is the author five books of poetry and prose, including an essay and poetry collection, ORANGE ROSES (Ahsahta, 2013), and A NOVELLA, NINETIES (Little A, 2015). Her first full-length novel, Impossible Views of the World, will be published by Penguin Press in 2017. Editor of Triple Canopy, Ives lives in New York City and teaches at the Pratt Institute.