Lynnell Edwards is a is a poet, essayist, teacher based in Louisville, Kentucky. As an experienced lecturer, reader, and workshop leader, she has presented with the Kentucky State Poetry Society, The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, The Filson Historical Society, the Appalachian Studies Association, the annual AWP conference, with the Bryant Park Reading Series in New York City, and in numerous graduate and undergraduate classes across the country. She serves as poetry faculty with the MFA program of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. Awards and honors include a Kentucky Arts Council Fellowship, Pushcart Prize nominations, and a fellowship from the Hermitage Artist Retreat. Her work often investigates the deep connections between a people and their place, including the natural, political, and family narratives in its history.
Photo: Julia Youngblood
The Bearable Slant of Light
What can we bear and what can we lift when a beloved, when our world, is light-struck and mad? The Bearable Slant of Light documents a web of clinical assessments, medications, the terrible beauties of delusion and the fragile gifts of darkness. Poems that reach across the history of writers and artists who fought and sometimes lost their own battles against mental illness are set against the urgencies of our anxious world and the intimate struggle of one family.
"...A complex, compassionate, and lyrical exploration of mental illness, The Bearable Slant of Light is going to mean a great deal to a great many people."
— Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones and You Could Make This Place Beautiful
