Works
An intimate and kaleidoscopic entry in the Multiverse series that excavates survival, storytelling, and coming to terms with an unruly mind.
In A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close, the stakes of writing are also the stakes of living. “Though I no longer wanted to die,” writes Lauren Russell, “our first years together were not easy … because I also did not want to live.” From this enigmatic in-between, Russell dives into multitudes: cats and questions; compulsion and devotion; narrative and diagnosis; language and loneliness; scrupulosity and stasis; suicidality and love.
Resisting the neurotypical expectation to choose any one answer arising from her explorations, she invites readers to engage: a pop quiz, a twelve-sided die, an abecedarian confession, a box of mirrors, several idiosyncratic diagnostic tools, and a suite of obsidian waiting rooms. Holding binaries in suspense, Russell seamlessly unfolds and enfolds the various operations of language, moving through forms with the restless brilliance of an architect turned ethicist turned collagist turned origamist. And everything, it seems, finds some way to turn back into poetry.
From psychological evaluation to clickbait, Russell transforms the world’s furious search for explanations into open inquiry. “How flat is the silence in your pocket?” she asks. “Is the inside of a wish an ossuary?” “Do questions stick you to the wall of sociability?” “Did I say I am making my own bestiary?” “What kind of cascade is this?” In a book dedicated to knowing, to not-knowing, and to its readers, Russell pulls back the curtain and invites us in.
—Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, author of before island is volcano
—Divya Victor, author of Curb
—Camonghne Felix, author of Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation
Co-winner of the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards
In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves, including the poet’s great-great-grandmother, Peggy. Through years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary’s omissions and to imagine the voice of Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present.
As “a work of biomythology”, Descent writes with, through, and against the blank interstices of the archive that act as a portal between the author’s origins in the history of both slaveholders and enslaved peoples and their present moment. These archives, and the absence of recorded names and agencies, are open only to what one imagines they could contain. … Part lyric memoir, poetic exploration, and archival research, Russell’s Descent enacts the wake of Christina Sharpe’s wake-work where “the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.” —Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, from the judge’s citation for the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award
What’s Hanging On the Hush wrestles with concerns that range from race, gender and sexuality to loneliness, madness and grief, and nothing escapes questioning, least of all the position of the poet herself. With humor and slightly off-kilter introspection, these poems disrupt even their own speaking, frequently singing “I.” Collectively, they demonstrate the underlying restlessness of a subjectivity never quite at ease, like the solitary cats who meander across these pages and disappear only to turn up where they are least expected. Operating in a range of modes, from tight lyrics to sprawling, fragmented texts to language experiments, What’s Hanging On the Hush is a tightly constructed interrogation of construction itself. At its heart is an exploration of solitude and a feminist’s existential reckoning—the struggle of being/making in the world.
Named one of Entropy’s best poetry collections of 2017
Variants
“Variants,” a box of poems, published as issue 17 of Slow Poetry in America.
from DESCENT
A selection from Descent, featuring a chalk erasure by the poet. Four-panel foldout limited-edition broadside. Available from Oxeye Press.
Hunt for the Unicorn
Boog Literature. Four-page pamphlet, available as a PDF.
Dream-Clung, Gone
Brooklyn Arts Press. Chapbook, available from SPD, Amazon, and Brooklyn Arts Press.
- “Variants: A Box of Poems,” BOMB
- “What the Poet Has,” JHU Magazine
- “Exposition,” Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day (includes audio)
- “Hidden Curriculum,” Not for Resale
- “Requiem for Elementary Language Acquisition,” The Brooklyn Rail
- “Are We Not Obsidian?” with audio, Aster(ix)
- “Eclogue,” Ashbery Erasures contribution, DIAGRAM
- Selections from Descent, The Tiny
- Excerpt from Descent, Tarpaulin Sky
- Excerpt from Descent, Scarlet (Jaded Ibis Press)
- Poem from Descent, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day (includes audio)
- “Dream-Clung, Gone,” New York Times Magazine
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- “Between a Dragonfly & an Osprey,” Sink Review (12-sided die/ sonnet crown with audio, interactive digital die, and printable die template)
- “Bilged on Her Anchor,” ythm (audio only)
- “I Keep Thinking I Want to Get Married When What I Mean Is Safety,” Spiral Orb
- “From the Horns,” Spark & Echo
- “11-9-16,” Tarpaulin Sky
- Excerpt from Descent, Hyperallergic
- Excerpt from Descent, The Brooklyn Rail
- “Unit,” Cricket Online Review
- “The Wind Is Rising,” boundary 2
- “_______ than Cake,” EK*PHRA*SIS
- Selections from What’s Hanging on the Hush, Tarpaulin Sky
- “Begotten, Not Made” and “Of Mice and Monsters,” Better (includes video)
- Four Poems, Packingtown Review
- Seven poems, The Brooklyn Rail
You can also find Lauren’s work in recent issues of The Georgia Review, Chicago Review, Foglifter, and Gulf Coast, as well as the fashion anthology Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear (Et Alia Press) and the poetry anthologies Alcatraz (Gazebo Books, Australia), Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press), Show Us Your Papers (Main Street Rag), and Bettering American Poetry 2015 (Bettering Books).
- “Faculty Voice: Poetry for the Moment” (on Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem), MSU Today
- “Lauren Russell on Joanna Fuhrman” for NaPo 30/30/30, The Operating System
- Review of Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk, Georgia Review
- “Open Letter from Our Writer in Residence,” Passa Porta International House of Literature magazine
- “The Right to Time and Space,” Millay Colony for the Arts blog
- “Free Is Not a Negro Doused in White,” a review of Charif Shanahan’s Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing, CAAPP blog
- “Inside the Bubble or of the Bubble,” a review of Joanna Fuhrman’s The Year of Yellow Butterflies, Boog City
- “Some Other Kind of Way to Be Alive,” an interview with Dana Ward, Hot Metal Bridge
- “Unraveling the Grand Cliché,” a review of Yona Harvey’s Hemming the Water, Aster(ix) Journal
- “Bordering on Madness,” a review of Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene, Jacket2
- Review of Barbara Henning’s Looking Up Harryette Mullen, The Volta
- Review of Camille Roy’s Sherwood Forest, The Volta
- Review of Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life, The Poetry Project Newsletter
- “Music Without Full Instrumentation,” an interview with Terrance Hayes, Hot Metal Bridge
- Review of Jamey Jones’ Blue Rain Morning, The Poetry Project Newsletter
- “The City Has No Memory of You,” a review of Kostas Anagnopoulos’s Moving Blanket, Harp & Altar
- Introduction for Monica Youn, William J. Sullivan, Jr. and Richard H. Elder Visiting Poet, presented by the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, October 3, 2023— READ
- Introduction for CAConrad, presented by the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, co-sponsored by the MSU Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives, April 20, 2023 — READ
- Introduction for Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, presented by the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, co-sponsored by the MSU Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives, April 20, 2023 — READ
- Introduction for Natasha T. Miller, presented by the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, October 19, 2022 — READ
- Introduction for Masaki Takashi, presented by the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, October 19, 2022— READ
- Introduction for Jonah Mixon-Webster, presented by the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, co-sponsored by the MSU Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives, April 6, 2022 — READ
- Introduction for Layli Long Soldier, presented by the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, co-sponsored by the MSU Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives, April 6, 2022 — READ
- Introduction for JJJJJerome Ellis, presented by the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University in partnership with HIVES, co-sponsored by the MSU Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives, April 6, 2022 — READ
- Introduction for Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, presented virtually by the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, February 2, 2002 — READ
- Introduction for Divya Victor, presented virtually by the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, October 6, 2021 — READ
- Introduction for Serena Chopra, presented virtually by the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, October 6, 2021 — READ
- Introduction for Marilyn Nelson, presented virtually by the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, co-sponsored by the MSU Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives, April, 7, 2021 — READ
- Introduction for Yona Harvey, presented virtually by the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU, February 18, 2021 — READ
- Introduction for Marcel Lamont Walker, presented virtually by the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU, February 18, 2021 — READ
- Introduction for Shara McCallum, co–presented virtually by RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and RCAH’s Lookout Gallery, November 9, 2020— READ
- Introduction for Adam Wolfond, co-presented virtually by the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and Unrestricted Interest, October 15, 2020 — READ
- Introduction for Sid Ghosh, co-presented virtually by the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and Unrestricted Interest, October 15, 2020 — READ
- Introduction for Imane Boukaila, co-presented virtually by the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and Unrestricted Interest, October 15, 2020 — READ
- Introduction for Hannah Emerson, co-presented virtually by the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and Unrestricted Interest, October 15, 2020 — READ
- Introduction for Reginald Dwayne Betts, co-presented virtually by the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and RCAH’s Wednesday Night Live, September 23, 2020 — READ
- Introduction for Tyrone Williams at the University of Pittsburgh, presented by the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), co-sponsored by the Humanities Center, September 30, 2019 — READ
- Introduction for Karen Lillis at White Whale Bookstore, August 17, 2019— READ
- Introduction for Edmund Berrigan at White Whale Bookstore, August 17, 2019— READ
- Introduction for Ross Gay at City of Asylum Pittsburgh’s Alphabet City, co-presented by CAAPP, February 15, 2019 — READ
- Introduction for Saretta Morgan at City of Asylum Pittsburgh’s Alphabet City, co-presented by the CAAPP, February 15, 2019 — READ
- Introduction for Rickey Laurentiis at the University of Pittsburgh, presented by CAAPP, January 24, 2019 — READ
- Introduction for Cornelius Eady, Cave Canem Reading at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, June 12, 2017— READ
- Introduction for Sites of Memory, a Language for Grieving, featuring M. NourbeSe Philip, Sonya Posmentier, and Ibrahima Seck, presented by CAAPP, April 5, 2017 — READ
- Introduction for Dawn Lundy Martin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, presented by the Felix Reading Series, April 20, 2016 — READ
Collaboration with visual artist and scholar Sarah Stefana Smith.
In collaboration, Sarah and Lauren envision using visual, spatial, and textual components to speak into spaces of omission and lack in the archive. In this collaboration we will draw on questions of what is visible and what is invisible, what is legible and what is illegible, who owns the narrative, who makes history, and how do we visualize black life and death? For Peggy: Hauntologies of Descent will exist at the intersection of our creative practices, using visual, spatial and textual components to speak into archival gaps and allow viewers to experience time as blurred, not a linear progression from the nineteenth century to the present but a space we wander across and through. Follow this process here.
