Winner of the Washington Prize
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“In her debut collection of poems If a Dolphin, Lindsay Remee Ahl explores the unstable and often disorienting rebirth of a drowned identity across space and time. She skillfully blurs the visceral and everyday with dreamlike, shifting consciousness in poems that stretch the boundaries of poetry’s conventions. Borrowing language from multiple voices, Ahl’s purpose is to articulate the path of a renewed identity, even as time and place remain ever-changing and unpredictable.”
“I have a cavalcade of lifetimes like a hundred candles in my mind…” writes Ahl. Be prepared to join her in multiple perspectives and co-existing realities. Ahl’s writing is full of grace, potency and out of the box surprise. Her poems are narrated by a girl drowned in a lake who continues to age in the afterlife and is capable of time travel, by the lifeguard who could not save her, by dolphins, World War II spies and occasionally by Ahl herself. The poetic microbiome of Ahl’s mind is boundless. The collection is a reflection of her ability to question time, place, the afterlife, and the fiction we adhere to that there is such a thing as an individual. Ahl’s premise is not based on mysticism as much as particle physics. Yet, the poems in If a Dolphin read like a wild Tibetan Bardo journey, shattering and enriching. —Joanne Dominique Dwyer
In Lindsay Ahl’s poems everything morphs and moves and everything dark is paired with something bright. When a garbage truck passes, “bits of paper fly out all around in the evening light.” A lake’s color “is ever-changing: tree-green, azure-grey, ice-blue” as “swimmers disappear into shade.” Holes open into water, present disappears into past, and sometimes reading If a Dolphin can feel like drowning—but that’s okay because in this book, drowning and surviving go hand in hand. The effect is of spending time in a world simultaneously dreamed and tremendously real—a disconcerting and beautiful place to live. —Daisy Fried
Call it time-travel, call it Dante’s Inferno with dolphins as Virgil. Walter Benjamin, with his black suitcase of writing (“history as a dream made of details”) makes an appearance, as do gryphons bursting into flight from ramparts and skyscrapers. The speaker returns to the drowning of a girl, and this girl becomes a woman who moves through wars, cities, and seas. What a gorgeous epistemology of love’s power, set against the tragedies of the human-made world. In one of the final, short poems, “The Last Thing,” Ahl writes “What world?/Only a feeling,/not language.//A bowing down.” —Connie Voisine
sample poems:
