Featured in the Shelf Unbound list of 2024 Indie Summer Reads
"Lynnell Edwards's The Bearable Slant of Light is a complex, compassionate, harrowing, and lyrical exploration of mental illness. These poems have many voices buzzing inside them, sometimes roaring cicada-loud: the words of doctors and nurses, parents, patients, and support groups; the language of manuals, assessments, intake forms, and medical charts. Both timely and timeless, The Bearable Slant of Light is going to mean a great deal to a great many people. What an achievement."
-Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod
"What if you were to write a book of poems expert in their formal invention and so varied in tone that the anger and helplessness and desperation of the poems were also shot through with a tough-minded, often darkly humorous intelligence sifting through possibility after possibility of solace and finding, after all that sifting, nothing but a pile of dust? No consolations, no moments of redemption, nothing but the hard and strange and always original perception of 'it happened this way but never the way I expected.' Well, this is the kind of book that Lynnell Edwards has written--a book whose occasion is the mental illness of her son, but whose subject is radical estrangement/self-estrangement. Her fierce response to the myth of therapy/wellness/amelioration demonstrates a poet of superb gifts. Prose poems, lyrics, dramatic monologues, meditative flights giving way to beautifully precise descriptive writing--no form of poetic inquiry is beyond her imagination's tenacious, tender, and skeptical engagement. On every page, the intelligence of the writing is matched by true integrity of feeling."
--Tom Sleigh, author of The King's Touch
