It's What I've Got Left - Paperback

by Lisa Allen (Author), Eileen Cleary (Editor), Martha McCollough (Designed by)

It's What I've Got Left cuts through inheritance, womanhood, and survival with an attentiveness to

what endures-and bites: memory lodged in the body, belief revised but not erased, love that

refuses to loosen its grip. In poems that braid lyric intensity with narrative pressure, these pages

trace how harm and devotion spool forward and back across generations, testing what love will

and will not allow. Prose poems such as "Dear Third Born Child, I Promise I'm Trying, Love,

Mom" and the searing "Notes for My Daughter As She Prepares for Her Most Public Sexual

Assault" unfold through instruction, footnote, and reckoning, holding rage and tenderness in the

same breath. Elsewhere, moments of hard-won clarity flare unexpectedly: "let the water make

the world a conch," a line that listens for vastness without judgment. Allen writes poems that

stay-echoing, spiraled, alive to what cannot be unlearned.

Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest and Bad Harvest