The imaginative scope and range of Book of Potions is marvelous. With so much tonal invention and play, not to mention grief, solitude, tenderness, angst and bravery, the book is truly a dreamscape: Watel has built a house with myriad rooms, each of them a dream that keeps spiraling. There is something reminiscent of Kafkas parables in Watels perspective, something Calvinoesque and Borgesian and even Gogolian, yes. But in the end, I felt, the book has a peculiarly American metaphysics of the self, an isolated and estranged self constantly grappling with the larger forces. Out of this metaphysics a human voice begins to speak, and through speaking re-arranges the landscape as we know it. Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
Potion: That which, when swallowed, has the power to change the world around us. In this marvelous collection, Lauren K. Watel has profoundly altered my sense of what a poem can do and be. The land- and heart-scapes she conjures into being are both strange and uncannily familiar. Here is a poet who shows no mercy to the usual consolations of sentiment. I have not read so brilliant, so transformative and technically masterful a book of poems in years.Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy
Lauren K. Watels Book of Potions comprises parables, gnostic and enigmatic narrative arcs and loops, secret recipes for the imagination, incantatory dramas, fierce judgments of the mind, equally fierce compassions, and a constant adventure of reflection that reflects not just the human self but the entire inner and outer dreamscape in which the self abides. A flawlessly written book of poems, powerful and self-contained in its sounds and its silences.Vijay Seshadri, author of That Was Now, This Is Then
When Kafka, writing his parables and fables, died, his gift transmigrated, with all its sly and despairing invention, its pitch-perfect ironies and imagistic and associative waywardness, into the soul of Lauren K. Watel. Her prose poems are the best kind of prose and the best kind of poem: offbeat, now fierce, now funny, acutely attuned to her own life and the life we live now: war, suicide, manias of all kinds; an ever expanding sense of dread and of lost possibility; love always on the brink of fulfillment colliding with human limitation; but never dour or preachy or easy to pin down. Her syntactic brilliance captures every least nuance of the personal, the social, and the spiritual. Tom Sleigh, author of The Kings Touch
Book of Potions is a collection evoking the 19th century and early Modernist poetic innovations that created the prose poem, akin to the work of Charles Baudelaire, Francois Ponge, and Samuel Beckett in ironic edginess and the wandering itineraries of unconsoled dreams. Yet I also see kinship in the Chinese poets of the Tang who wrote mysterious, metaphysical dream-prose about journeys into other worldslike the Taoist mondo of Chuang-tzu who dreamed he was a butterfly, then wrote he mightve been a butterfly dreaming he was a man. In the way of these literary ancestors, Watels own prose is cadenced, composed, and plotted as much by sound as the sense of dreams. Its style is refined, beautifully lyric, mysterious, and emerges from the heightened imagination of poetic flight. Nothing in American verse is quite like it. It is the poetry of the universe of ten-thousand things. Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road
After drinking these potions Lauren K. Watel has brewed, I am at least one hundred years wiser. I wish I knew what spoon she used to stir poetry into prose with such mastery, such tenderness. Believe me when I tell you, I swallowed this book whole and grew a second heart. Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily
Just under the surface of Lauren K. Watels sassy, wry, quizzical prose poems, nightmares thrum. Masks slip, and faces are missing; armies march; the speaker is 'playing solitaire at the end of the world'; recurrently, a father shoots himself in the head. Watel converts mayhem to fable, and makes a style out of survival. A gallant and original book. Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth
The playfully resonant title of Lauren K. Watels Book of Potions not only positions it between genres, but also signals a book in a constant, fluid state of betweenness: a book fluxing between dream and awakening, between present, past, and future, illusion and disillusion. Each tightly composed potion has the completeness of a prose poem, but each page turned is also a transition, a jump cut, another inventive link in an interior narration of ongoing transformation. Watels style is a powerful element of her voice. Theres wit, chiseled sentences, vivid imagery, and given the interiority, the presiding effect, rather than cinematic, is kinetic. Book of Potions is a masterpiece of sustained prose rhythm, and a wonderfully original debut.Stuart Dybek, author of Streets in Their Own Ink
Lauren K. Watel resituates language in these precise, startling and mordant prose poems. Attuned to the times and to all time, the author stewards these gorgeous pieces with a fine-tuned sense of how best to enter a readers heart and mind.Amy Hempel, author of Sing to It
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