We’re honored to be hosting the official book launch of Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut poetry collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane on Tuesday, September 20.

In this collection, Lynne Jensen Lampe explores her relationship with her mother, her mother’s mental illness, and postpartum issues, as well as gender and our still-limited knowledge of the mind. Poet Ed Skoog says, “The poetic imagination is only one of Lynne Jensen Lampe's tools for reaching into the past, along with photographs, letters on onionskin, erasure, research and tears.…The poems in this book are like spells cast against ghosts.”

The heart of Talk Smack to a Hurricane is a series of erasures created from pages of a letter Lynne’s mother wrote the day after giving birth. They tell of a new mother happy with life until an inexplicable mental shift sends her from maternity ward to psych ward—for a year, 2400 miles away from her husband and child. The other poems in the book expand on this history, examining faith, family heritage, anti-semitism, psychiatry, and life choices.

Talk Smack to a Hurricane fights notions of shame and stigma. The book offers up both tender and volatile moments, the daily fight for an ordinary life. It pays tribute to a complicated woman who loved her daughter.

Come and listen to Lynne read from and discuss her work and help us celebrate the launch of this beautiful book into the world!

Lynne Jensen Lampe was born in Newfoundland and raised mostly in Louisiana, with a few early years spent in Wisconsin. Themes of conformity, sanity, gender, and faith often find their way into her work. Lynne’s poems appear in many journals, including Figure 1, Yemassee, The American Journal of Poetry, One, and Rock & Sling, as well as SMEOP: Urban, a UK anthology. She was a finalist for the 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. Lynne lives with her husband and two dogs in Columbia, Missouri. When not throwing squeaky toys or forgetting to water the plants, she makes time to edit academic books and journals.