Death & The Maiden: Odes to the Dead Girls of Pop Culture

Death & the Maiden is not only a love letter to popular culture’s dead girls but an analysis of a self. It holds mirrors in carnival, full-length, and vanity form—even if “[n]ot everything gets to be a mirror.” Versions of the speaker glimmer in a panache palette of color, a divebar’s ashen haze, pushpinned pleading; promises, omens, whispered wishes; animation, cult classics, horror. Lucy Hannah Ryan reaches through the glass and the screen to suture a body of poetry that not only is a reflection, but reflects onto the reader.

— Rachael Crosbie, author of author of Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen and Peanut [the cat] auditions as Courage [...from Courage the Cowardly Dog]

Lucy Hannah Ryan’s poetry collection Death & The Maiden oozes blood and gushes liquid strawberry from the core of bubblegum fleeting filmic (and literary) female flesh. Elegiac poetry at its finest, Death & The Maiden is elevated by the wisdom of the poet and its feminine focus, its understanding that “loveliness [is] its own kind of martyrdom.”

— Kristin Garth, author of Lollygagger & many other books