In Tongue Lyre, Tyler Mills weaves together fragments of myth and memory, summoning the works of Ovid, Homer, and James Joyce to spin a story of violence and the female body. Introducing the recurring lyre figure in the collection—a voice to counter the violence—is Ovid’s Philomena, who, while cruelly rendered speechless, nonetheless sets the reader on an eloquent voyage to discover the body through music, art, and language. Other legendary figures making appearances within—Telemachos, Nestor, Cyclops, Circe, and others—are held up as mirrors to reflect the human form as home. In this dynamic collection, the female body and its relationship to the psyche traverse mythic yet hauntingly familiar contemporary settings as each presents not a single narrative but a progressive exploration of our universal emotional experience.

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Tyler Mills’s poems have received the Crab Orchard Review’s Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, the Third Coast Poetry Prize, and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets 2007, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Mills received a BA from Bucknell University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois–Chicago.