This glowing debut explores the wonders and cruelties occurring within nature, science, and religion. Its poems pulse like starlight.
This astonishing, self-assured debut leads readers on an exploration to the stars and back, begging them to reconsider the boundaries of self, time, space, and knowledge.
"The playfulness and creative flourishes showcase the poet having the time of their life in crafting this debut."
-Foreword Reviews
"Online, month by month, I watched it happen: a new genre of poem was emerging, but I had no clue who was responsible. These brainy poems didn't wait to spout off trivia, historical and scientific-'Pavlov Was the Son of a Priest' (a characteristically quotable title) recalls that 'the moon smells like spent gunpowder,' then divulges some smoldering self-knowledge: 'I'm sorry/I couldn't hide my joy when you said
lonely.' . . . [T]hese poems were fluent in funniness, retweetably jokey: 'I'm//the vice president of panic, and the president is/missing.' But once the play subsided, you found yourself moved-unaccountably, almost, until you discovered, reading back up the poem, that even the zaniest elements had several parts to play. What looked like a genre, I soon realized, was all the handiwork of one poet. Their name is Paige Lewis. . . . Don't doubt them."
-Christopher Spaide, Poetry
"If you are holding this book, know that you are holding a work of wild and tender imagination. You are holding distance and saints and orchards and mouths. You are holding the full-length debut of Paige Lewis, a gifted poet whose words bring the light of elsewhere to this planet. I have been holding my breath for this book; now it, with loving strangeness, is holding mine."
-Heather Christle
"I don't have faith in much these days, but I do have immense belief in Paige Lewis, in the spaces they create (and deliciously destroy) inside each marvelous poem, 'where we all fit.' Lyn Hejinian writes, 'The mouth is just a body filled with imagination. . . .' and this collection is a master class on the prosody of repletion. Lewis revels in cerebral delight despite the rigid contours of anxiety, creeping at each poem's periphery. By the end of the book we are looking up, not at the stars, but at Lewis-shining with a planetary pull.
Space Struck is a wondrous arrival."
-Tiana Clark
"In this mighty and?marvelous debut (emphasis on the?marvel), Paige Lewis gifts us with lush and provocative bounty on every page all while?displaying their considerable gifts of grace. The poems in
Space Struck read like a kind of alchemy I've simply not seen before-I'm so charmed by declarations like, 'I spent years living with ghosts/ strung between my teeth...they made me the delicate/gulper i am today.' After reading this lyric record of save and savor for this glorious planet, I am quite disarmed.?I am quite undone."
-Aimee Nezhukumatathil
