White Lies

The ghost of want and memory, fogged or true, haunts Crystal Stone's electric collection, White Lies. These ghosts are everywhere, like shapeshifters, the apparent shifting of familial memory and its gaslit nature is both fuel and drive for these poems. There is a sense, too, of what more could be had were circumstances different, a meditation on the inheritance handed us through history-what can you build with the tools you're given, even when those tools are lopsided and ill-fit for use? This is a collection of bold, glittering language that doesn't shy away from its hard questions about the self and the self's past but races at it, full-force, utterly unbridled. These are poems operating at full canter, lashing toward the truth at the center, to a full-fledged woman finding that, at the center of herself, there is herself. Here is an unflinching masterwork of unpicking the familial ties, the "white lies," we live with and how we forge ourselves separate from them. (from a review by Lorcan Black, author of Strange Husbandry)