How to Hypnotize a Lobster
Julia Rose Lewis

Selected by Laura Goode for the PITCH VIPER PRIZE 2018.

The speakers in Lewis’ HtHaL tolerate the bafflements of desire by a kind of plucky didacticism and wordplay, well aware the gaze is upon them. One asks: ‘Could hexagonal-dipyramidal be the kind of space group you are seeking?’; another, ‘What about the peahens?’ They dispense with interest in beginnings and ends straightaway, and set about wondering what it is to proceed.

‘These poems accrue into a system of logic that succeeds entirely on the unique terms of its own self-invention.’

—Laura Goode