ABOUT THIS BOOK

In raw, lyrical poems, Host explores parasitic relationships—between men and women, sons and mothers, and humans and the earth—and considers their consequences. How much control do we have over our lives? To what extent are we being controlled? And how much does it matter in the end? Revealing the unvarnished pain of mistreatment—whether inflicted maliciously or accidentally—Lisa Fay Coutley examines legacies of abuse in poems that explore how trauma parasitizes bodies, infecting the text, repeating in language and image the injuries the body has been subjected to.

               Ask me why

light can pour warm through a cold bay
window while water under sun is dark
as a closed door. A man’s hand

   erases a girl’s thigh. The trees start starving
       themselves into everyone’s favorite color.
           Her darkest room digs itself

   below her throne. The body knows no
wrong move. The more love, the more.
—Excerpt from “Oubliette”

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether, Errata, In the Carnival of Breathing, and Small Girl: Micromemoirs, and the editor of In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy. She is an associate professor of poetry and creative nonfiction in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

REVIEWS

“Coutley’s riveting new collection spirals around the complexities of host as multitude or throng, host as spiritual sustenance, host as living organism upon which a parasite lives. These poems, dazzling in their heartbreak, slice themselves open along the razor’s edge of risk and tenderness. Here, patriarchal violence and the desire to subjugate women are paralleled by the deliberate ecocide of the Anthropocene. Here, the desires and impossibilities of nurturing are pitted against the desires and impossibilities of the synthetic object. These are unforgettable, achingly gorgeous, sunflower-studded poems that ‘scream for a brightness none of us can hold.’”—Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50

“Host—what does it mean? This is the crucial question of Lisa Fay Coutley’s searing new collection of poetry. What is it to be a mother hosting sons, especially in a nation in the grip of patriarchal rage? To have a female body forced to host violence and trauma? To be part of the human host destroying our host, the earth? These are deeply lived and deeply felt questions for Coutley, who brings them under her fierce gaze and writes them into poems of great candor and power.”—Dana Levin, author of Now Do You Know Where You Are

“Part elegy to the Anthropocene, part case study of internet-era loneliness, the metaphorical relationships woven throughout Host’s poignant, timely, and necessary poems are many: mother host to son, woman host to patriarchy, flower host to human pleasure, Earth host to people’s waste. Among these layered threats to the body and the planet, there’s a plea for repair, for reclamation, as one speaker asks, ‘did you hear me / agree to be an island?’ Here we have a poet at the height of her craft, skillfully rendering the essential dispatches we all need to hear.”—Trey Moody, author of Autoblivion

TABLE OF CONTENTS