“In the breathtaking ‘escape room’ of Celeste Lipkes’s Radium Girl, our ardent guide dons, by turns, the snow-flaked robe of patient, the white coat of physician, the lustrous cape of magician. The word ‘magic’ is rooted in the PIE ‘magh’—‘to be able, to have power’— and in this radiant debut, body and mystery exchange their secrets about what can and cannot be controlled—in illness, in love, and in the salvific art of poetry itself.”—Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and Paradise Close: A Novel
“Celeste Lipkes, poet and clinical psychiatrist, is Dr. Oliver Sacks and Stevie Smith rolled into one. With perspicacity, her luminous first book meditates on many odd juxtapositions including Houdini and medical school, Crohn’s disease and love. Dividing her idiosyncratic lyrics into four sections—‘Rabbit,’ ‘Dove,’ ‘Hemicorporectomy,’ and ‘Escape’—Radium Girl brings us close to a young speaker under pressure to honor the Hippocratic oath and make her way in the world. Annie Dillard said poets to be poets should study something else. Lipkes did, to great success: by the last page, her poetry radiates with talent, acuity, and originality.”—Spencer Reece, author of The Clerk’s Tale and The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir
“[A] sage debut. . . . Lipkes’s holistic perspective offers uncommon insight into the unrelenting and miraculous will of the body and consciousness.”—Publishers Weekly