MARIE CONLAN
new poetry collection
Neurotic Love Baby
reserve your copy today
PRAISE FOR NEUROTIC LOVE BABY
Marie Conlan’s poetry has an aperture that widens & compresses in neurotic palpitations. With a psychedelic tenderness, Conlan guides us through a spinning vortex, launching us into snow puddles, smearing us with cacti snot, crumbling us into seed. Questions are posed & answered through the wild mundane. God is found in trembling fists. Through bodies through bloodroots through morning smell of bacon grease & kaleidoscopic landscapes, we feel the raw yearning of a young being attempting to get even closer to her lover; attempting to weave her life, her love, her fear, her reverence & her dreaming into a kind of beauty. For Conlan, any kind of beauty breeds the realest kind of meaning.
–Gabrielle Joy Lessans, author of Bread Of
Marie Conlan’s newest collection, Neurotic Love Baby spans five intoxicating sections composed of entropic spaces, hues of wilderness, and piercing questions that are at once ephemeral and funny: “How many things do you own?” Jutting images and gritty testimony collide to embody intimate fields wherein “you are a sepia rinse & I keep seeing your face bloom from inside my mouth”. Conlan’s prose-like poems, in their varying incarnations, culminate into a landscape where bodies decompose and mix “with blood, dust with sweat” inside an urgent syntax that does not let up. These moments arise as a glimmering compost of contrast and tension which are both feral and refined, electric and emboldened: “you rub the line of my spine you tenderize me into a pulp I am waiting for you to discard at the bottom of your morning juice.” Here, the segments live as a coating of sediment and sentiment, of “leaking petals” we wear together as we peer into a “three pastel sunset.”
–Heather Sweeney, author of Dear Marshall, Language is Our Only Wilderness & Call Me California
–Gabrielle Joy Lessans, author of Bread Of
Marie Conlan’s newest collection, Neurotic Love Baby spans five intoxicating sections composed of entropic spaces, hues of wilderness, and piercing questions that are at once ephemeral and funny: “How many things do you own?” Jutting images and gritty testimony collide to embody intimate fields wherein “you are a sepia rinse & I keep seeing your face bloom from inside my mouth”. Conlan’s prose-like poems, in their varying incarnations, culminate into a landscape where bodies decompose and mix “with blood, dust with sweat” inside an urgent syntax that does not let up. These moments arise as a glimmering compost of contrast and tension which are both feral and refined, electric and emboldened: “you rub the line of my spine you tenderize me into a pulp I am waiting for you to discard at the bottom of your morning juice.” Here, the segments live as a coating of sediment and sentiment, of “leaking petals” we wear together as we peer into a “three pastel sunset.”
–Heather Sweeney, author of Dear Marshall, Language is Our Only Wilderness & Call Me California
Say Mother Say Hand
OUT NOW
PRAISE FOR SAY MOTHER SAY HAND
"Marie Conlan traces a lineage throughout Say Mother Say Hand, moving from allusions to the Seven Mothers of the World to the serpentine nuances of personal history. Through this debut she pioneers that lineage of examination, empathy, and experimentation-as-exploration. In Conlan's words, the traditions we turn and return to as we celebrate love and comfort ourselves through loss pupate and swell to be seen through a grippingly original lens. Here is a book of generations, of knuckles and laces, of treasures and 'remnants from an unknown sea.' Here are pages that are lovingly alive, filled with marrow."
—David Welch, author of Everyone Who is Dead
"Every family has a storyteller--one who takes note, digs deep, and attempts to make sense of the past. In this incredibly inventive and highly personal exploration of family, history, and trauma, Marie Conlan offers us ways to move beyond pain by taking the past and transforming it into 'something sweet to chew on, a salve, a story.' She reminds us that while we might not be able to escape our lineage, 'there's nothing to inherit,' and we have the power within is to make our own narrative, our own futures. Her incantatory language functions like a spell that moves to cast out the ways in which history tends to repeat itself. In the end, we are reminded that the cure for everything is always love."
-Sara Veglahn, author of The Mayflies & The Ladies
"In Conlan's memoir, we stand with her at the altar as she vows to her ancestors not even death do us part. Death and its close calls are what guide her (and us) through a hagiography of people who may or may not be worthy of being seen as heroes, heroines, friends, and shadows through the innocent, questioning eyes of a child, and the troubled, interrogative eyes of that child as an adult--eyes that are simultaneously passive receiver and active perceiver. Conlan writes, 'I begin to think if I have a little girl, I will name her after what you could have been,' inviting her family lineage to keep dreaming, repeating, stuttering, and 'looking for proof' of lives lived and yet to be lived. It is hard to know in this book who is sick and who is not, the sick and the healthy set against the backdrop of needy children, or needing children. What Conlan needs is to clear space within her body, one that is occupied by family, to make room for a lover who shows up like a lightening storm, causing steam to rise: 'if I could just fit his bones into my body.' At the same time, she needs to keep her family close because without them, she could not survive: 'make her stay in our bones.' Conlan catechizes these needs, breaks them apart, and puts them together again, satisfied or not, writing vibrant and brilliantly crafted scenes cut from memory, excised from her skin."
-Karolina Zapal, author of Notes for Mid-Birth and Polalka
—David Welch, author of Everyone Who is Dead
"Every family has a storyteller--one who takes note, digs deep, and attempts to make sense of the past. In this incredibly inventive and highly personal exploration of family, history, and trauma, Marie Conlan offers us ways to move beyond pain by taking the past and transforming it into 'something sweet to chew on, a salve, a story.' She reminds us that while we might not be able to escape our lineage, 'there's nothing to inherit,' and we have the power within is to make our own narrative, our own futures. Her incantatory language functions like a spell that moves to cast out the ways in which history tends to repeat itself. In the end, we are reminded that the cure for everything is always love."
-Sara Veglahn, author of The Mayflies & The Ladies
"In Conlan's memoir, we stand with her at the altar as she vows to her ancestors not even death do us part. Death and its close calls are what guide her (and us) through a hagiography of people who may or may not be worthy of being seen as heroes, heroines, friends, and shadows through the innocent, questioning eyes of a child, and the troubled, interrogative eyes of that child as an adult--eyes that are simultaneously passive receiver and active perceiver. Conlan writes, 'I begin to think if I have a little girl, I will name her after what you could have been,' inviting her family lineage to keep dreaming, repeating, stuttering, and 'looking for proof' of lives lived and yet to be lived. It is hard to know in this book who is sick and who is not, the sick and the healthy set against the backdrop of needy children, or needing children. What Conlan needs is to clear space within her body, one that is occupied by family, to make room for a lover who shows up like a lightening storm, causing steam to rise: 'if I could just fit his bones into my body.' At the same time, she needs to keep her family close because without them, she could not survive: 'make her stay in our bones.' Conlan catechizes these needs, breaks them apart, and puts them together again, satisfied or not, writing vibrant and brilliantly crafted scenes cut from memory, excised from her skin."
-Karolina Zapal, author of Notes for Mid-Birth and Polalka