Lizzie, Speak by Kailey Tedesco

QUOTES ABOUT THE BOOK:

Kailey Tedesco is a poet compelled by resonance. The poems within Lizzie, Speak, read with the cadence of spells, each like its own intoxicating cosmos of sound. In “lizzie new age / lizzie new wave” you feel yourself tripping down the haunted ghost path of language, stumbling towards something deadly yet tantalizing much like the collection’s titular assumed murderer muse, Lizzie Borden—'goat-milk butters my dialect / heartfelt i am lounging on plum-sward / & these waves thieve / my shoes / something about this ghost has gone…’ Tedesco conjures Borden to speak as if not only to be finally given a chance to tell her story—’Papa denies me a new  / set of pens’—but for all those “dangerous women” of the then and now to finally ‘harvest [their own] ghosts  / from the holes  / that caused them.’ Lizzie, Speak is a book about the authority of language and the ghosts that inhabit it. As Dickinson once said, ‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted’ and as Tedesco proves here, haunting takes many forms.

—Trista Edwards, author of Spectral Evidence

Kailey Tedesco’s Lizzie, Speak is not merely a collection of poetry, but a conjuring, an invocation, a communion with Lizzie Borden herself. By voices, sometimes distinctly Kailey, sometimes Lizzie, I am guided through this séance of a new confessional until, ultimately, the line between the two becomes vague, itself a ghost without time or presence, “to speak / the language of saints, protected.” From the very beginning, I can feel my fingers on the planchette as these poems reveal –– letter by word by line –– a spirit, a history, an identity. Lizzie speaks through Tedesco, who has given us a beautiful portrait that is not only haunting and ethereal, but also temporal, intimate, and true."​

—Angelo Colavita, author of Flowersonnets