Poems by Lightsey Darst

April 11, 2023 • 6 x 9 • 112 pages • 978-1-56689-673-3

In her most intimate poetry collection yet, Lightsey Darst considers the many facets of maternal power and whether it might guide us toward healing in the wake of history’s horrors.

In the nebulous space between collective and autobiographical memory lies family memory—the rituals and routines, places and plants, that bind us to the generations before. In The Heiress/Ghost Acres, Lightsey Darst examines her Southern ancestry and the legacy of white womanhood. As she navigates pandemic isolation and political upheaval, Darst reflects on how history—familial and national—shapes parenting, and interrogates that history in search of more ethical, transformative ways to mother. The Heiress/Ghost Acres points toward a tenable and connected future, one that acknowledges past evils while finding present, potent ways for love to counter violence.

About the Author

Lightsey Darst has published three previous books of poetry with Coffee House Press, including Find the Girl, which was awarded a Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, one for dance criticism and one for poetry. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her family.

Praise for The Heiress/Ghost Acres

“‘Why was I unprepared to be so loved?’ Where parenthood is the catalyst to politics, Lightsey Darst’s conjoined book grows question after question. How might we survive in a motherland designed to purchase motherlessness? How can we—connected in both silence and radiance—be worth our children’s light? In the bloody midst of a magicless empire, ‘What magic empire might I still build from my blood?’ Dissenting what’s given, she asks and asks and asks. And every so often an answer flowers out: ‘My child is climbing my everything, / climbing the tree of my mind / so I must furiously grow / this apple she’s seeking.’ In other words, Darst is offering us the seeds we need most: restlessness, honesty, awe, and reckoning.” —Chris Martin

Praise for Thousands

Bustle, “The 18 Best Poetry Collections of 2018”

“For Darst, to remember is to claim ownership of one’s pain and, by extension, one’s humanity.” —Publishers Weekly

“One of [Thousands’] strengths is how Darst weaves quotations, dates, and places into her work, making attributions in the margins. It allows the reader to feel both intimately involved as an observer, but also, somehow, present. . . . This is a collection in which all readers will recognize something, if in nothing else then in the humanity of the poet herself.” —The Paris Review

“Darst’s intimacy here is masterful: whether it is love, lust, pregnancy, or words.” —The Millions

“[Thousands] has an intimacy about it that speaks to the tenderness inside the reader. . . . Don’t be surprised if there’s a catch in your throat when you read." —Signature Reads

“As they carve their way through this markedly contemporary landscape, Darst’s readers will likely have trouble separating the dreams, desires, and fears the speaker expresses from their own—the text of these poems is everything you might catch yourself thinking, and everything you might hope someone else could share with you.” —The Arkansas International

“Dear fear, dear darkness, dear misunderstandings, dear life, dear lost-in-myself, I am no longer afraid of you. Now I have this book. I have Lightsey Darst’s amazing and ecstatic meditation on being a person in the world, I have these poems to guide me, I have her bravery and wild mind, I have her spells and wisdom, I have these incredible poems to carry with me wherever I go.” —Matthew Dickman

“Lightsey Darst’s ability to find astonishment within and without—to lift the story of many varied days inside a set of years inside and outside of a marriage, a love affair, and a pregnancy—until it sings with revelation, drew me into Thousands immediately and never let go. Thrillingly unafraid to state what women are often dismissed for stating, Darst elevates language into something so wholly artful that neither the poems nor the grit can be denied. In Thousands, Darst takes longing and ecstasy and melancholy and doubt back from the patriarchy to write toward the canon of the future.” —Lynn Melnick

“Thousands is an unabashed and compelling collection of poetry. . . . The poems are unafraid to remark upon the world as it is, to touch on areas of womanhood that are often overlooked, including sex and yearning and the interior of a marriage falling apart.” —The Corresponder

“Simultaneously vulnerable and self-assured, Darst’s verse will have you clamoring for everything she’s ever written.” —Bustle

Praise for Dance

“DANCE is an artful collection of poems that . . . are often raw and unpredictable. There is a grace and beauty in the poems that shows of Darst’s background in dance as the poems pirouette form one subject to another.” —San Francisco Book Review

“Like a horoscope, the book is something a reader can return to daily, finding new meaning each time.” —Star Tribune

“DANCE is filled with movement. . . . [Darst] has the unique ability to express motion with words.” —MPR

“DANCE is to The Divine Comedy as Darst is to Dante: heretical. Where once terza rima could take a Christian from hell to paradise, here our secular poet pilgrim must make from montage a map of the contemporary, its unstable terrain supersaturated by information and violent inequities alike. Because empire loves artifice and free-market capitalism has branded our vernacular, because lyric is too singular and narrative too linear, DANCE privileges none of the above. Each of its unheroic couplets is as ‘pliant as / a swan, cut open & laid out flat to make a sign.’ But what kind of sign? Anarchic, critical, and brilliant, built of many voices, these brave poems give to our radical uncertainty and certain complicity testimony that doesn’t diminish their power to unsettle us. This is an ambitious, ethical book—‘nothing else / does justice to this year.’” —Brian Teare, author of Companion Grasses

“This is the book I hadn’t known I’d been waiting for—until I read it, riveted. Anchored in a shifting history, propelled by a phosphorescent phrasing that subtly startles, it’s a book whose structure echoes Dante while its tone invokes the gothic. The whole demonstrates just how the present is constructed of every past moment, and how those moments still inhabit it, never silent. But it’s above all her handling of language; as rich as the fox furs, comets, and botanical detail she brings to her pages, Darst’s sculpted syntax and charged vocabulary keep the text moving with an uncanny depth to their pacing. It will keep you up at night.” —Cole Swensen

Praise for Find the Girl

“A dark but beautiful first book. . . . This is a vital poetry of the Deep South ripe with bones, blood and bogs, Snow Whites, Gretels and debutantes all stirred into a harrowing stew of lust, dusk and summer.” —The New York Times

“A unique and dynamic collection of poetry.” —Feminist Review

“[Darst] dives in, turning gruesome forensics into the filigree of poetry, and examining the strange pall that dead-girl culture . . . throws over the adolescence of real girls.” —MinnPost

“Fairy-tale prose blends vivid botanical images with not-so-happy endings. . . . Find the Girl is empowering in a brutal way. Read it and you will find the pages turning, as if [of] their own volition.” —Minnesota Reads

“A rich and honest chronicle of the transition from girlhood to womanhood. You won’t find poems about pearls, ribbons and curls here.” —Southern Minnesota Venus

“[Find the Girl] is a forceful, unforgettable, debut by a writer who has already learned her craft. The writing is assured, urgent and arresting.” —Galatea Resurrects

“[Find the Girl] brings contemporary sensationalism into focus, raising (but not answering) many of the moral questions most poets don’t ask.” —Molossus

“This first book by Lightsey Darst moves the reader to consider unspeakable crimes against girls—not from the perpetrator’s point of view so often portrayed in salacious TV dramas, but from a deeply personal stance that becomes an elegy for girlhood. . . . Most remarkably, these poems give us a chance to see the fine line between the girls we have been ourselves and the lost girls who never became women. . . . It is in her sensual language that these poems gain our hard-won interest.” —Cerise Press

“Bluegrass and teen lust, the sequels to horror films and the modernist fragment, perennial myth and murder mystery, all erupt into Lightsey Darst’s serious poems. . . . Playing hooky, playing dead, playing ‘an instrument built from her body,’ Darst is playing with fire: her verse lights up the night sky.” —Stephanie Burt

“Find the Girl is a book of poems as urgent as its title. . . . Here we have an important new poetic voice, one that fully earns Louis Zukofsky’s observation that, in poetry, ‘Each word itself is an arrangement / The story must exist in each word or it cannot go on.’ Lightsey Darst has internalized this, practiced it, perfected it, and brought it to us in this incredible collection. She has done something truly new.” —Laura Kasischke

“We should not lie about life. Find the Girl, in its violent intricacies unearthed by the hand of a poet dutiful to the women and girls long lost from poetry, knows this. . . . Find the Girl is an important, ravaging debut.” —Katie Ford