Overview

STB Poetry Prize Selection (2024) Devils, water nymphs, ghosts, witches, and human monsters all populate the Southern-gothic dreamscapes in Chimera. Bridging such dichotomies as myth and reality, life and death, and water and land; these poems shimmer in a liminal space. As the speaker navigates through the trauma of acute liver failure and brain injury, she weaves a spellbook mapping her way out of the Underworld via the forests and swamps of Louisiana and Texas.

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9781949540635

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Reviews

Liz Scheid, author of Shape of Blue: LeeAnn Olivier asks us to sit beside her at a hospital bed and ""claw through cuffed wrists."" Each poem is an invitation to escape and shapeshift through daylight and dream-where we're at once woman, chimera, and snake, shedding selves. In this ""season of madness,"" there is beauty in the becoming, and in the hope and dreams of a donated liver. These poems remind us of the power of a woman hellbent to survive and how beautiful it is to be alive. I'm obsessed with this book. Steve Lambert, author of Heat Seekers and The Shamble: After reading LeeAnn Olivier's Chimera, I believe she thinks in myth. Yet, as mythical in scope as Chimera is, it does not eschew the personal, and the myths are usually grounded in metaphor, as the good ones tend to be. And while mythical creatures abound in Olivier's work, they are, as the Greeks had it, amongst us. Not encountered in a netherworld, but from one. This is not Alice in Wonderland but a kind of grown person's Beasts of the Southern Wild in poetry. The creatures in Olivier's poems are friend and foe to the mythical-personal heroine of these poems; she both runs from and with these real monsters and human devils-and (most importantly, I think) she delights in the Gulf Coast greens and Cajun reds of her semi-invented realm. These incantatory, spellbinding, lushly imagistic poems, are the purview of a Southern witchy femme fatale with a gift for imagery. These poems will ""put a spell on you."" Tim Z. Hernandez, author of They Call You Back: LeeAnn Olivier is a remarkable talent, and her debut collection, Chimera, is a bold testament to the body's endurance, and the myriad ways in which poetry is capable of healing more than just the spirit.

Author Information

Raised in Louisiana on new-wave music, horror films, and Grimm fairy tales, LeeAnn Olivier is a neo-Southern-Gothic poet. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso, and her poetry has appeared in dozens of literary journals, including most recently The Missouri Review, Bloodletter, and Superpresent. She is an assistant professor of English and Humanities at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas. As a survivor of breast cancer and an emergency liver transplant, Olivier hopes to help her students navigate their own challenges through creative expression.

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