front cover of Errata
Errata
Lisa Fay Coutley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
COR series Open Competition winner
Finalist, INDIEFAB Book of the Year

Lisa Fay Coutley’s lyrical debut collection, Errata, investigates the delicate balance between parent and child, love and loss, hope and grief. Errata’s narrator reflects on struggles and fears that span generations in compositions that are at once musical and bleak. Coutley’s narrative journey is often a dark one, exploring not only the loss of loved ones but also the potential to lose one’s very self. The collection unravels the lingering consequences of abuse and addiction, yet threads of hope and determination weave a finely wrought path through the dark side of human relationships, illuminating the power of the will to survive. Coutley’s sharp yet tender collection will both haunt readers and move them to reflect, to remember, and most of all, to persevere.
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front cover of Host
Host
Lisa Fay Coutley
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
In raw, lyrical poems, Host explores parasitic relationships—between men and women, sons and mothers, and humans and the earth—and considers their consequences. How much control do we have over our lives? To what extent are we being controlled? And how much does it matter in the end? Revealing the unvarnished pain of mistreatment—whether inflicted maliciously or accidentally—Lisa Fay Coutley examines legacies of abuse in poems that explore how trauma parasitizes bodies, infecting the text, repeating in language and image the injuries the body has been subjected to.
 
                Ask me why

light can pour warm through a cold bay
window while water under sun is dark
as a closed door. A man’s hand

    erases a girl’s thigh. The trees start starving
        themselves into everyone’s favorite color.
            Her darkest room digs itself

    below her throne. The body knows no 
wrong move. The more love, the more.
—Excerpt from “Oubliette”
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