Avail - by Erin O'Luanaigh (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Avail, Erin O'Luanaigh's breathtaking debut poetry collection, the young poet charts her life during and after its transformation by illness.

With an introduction by Ange Mlinko

"Avail shows us a world in which American popular culture mixes and meshes with European high culture, in which sestinas go wild, in which veils become vales, and in which lyric playfulness runs hard against chill form. This is an irrepressible debut collection, one to relish time after time."
--Kevin Hart, author of Wild Track: New and Selected Poems and Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood

Avail features a long prose-poem which titles the book and winds through sections of lineated, often formal poems. The prose-poem comprises a series of lyric meditations on the image of the veil--from religious and cultural veils, to veils imbedded in idiom and metaphor, to veiled women in art and classic films, to veils drawn and parted by illness and death--which slowly divulge the harrowing details of the poet's blood disorder.

Throughout, allusions to classic film, literature, and art serve as the "veils" with which the poet attempts to obscure the self-estrangement and vulnerability her illness has induced--insecurities which follow her long after her recovery. In a poem about a break-up set during her career as a jazz singer and against the backdrop of a 1930s screwball comedy, she longs "to shake life by the martini (but stay self- / possessed), to star in the movie of myself / instead of playing second lead." During a visit to Naples, Mt. Vesuvius becomes "a Crawford eyebrow / arched over the bay." And in California, after a trip to the Getty Villa, she recalls Sontag's "missive on allusion, that no part / of any work is new, that all is reproduction." By the end of the collection, O'Luanaigh has fashioned from the sum of these various allusions her own poetic identity, unveiled in the poems themselves.

Review Quotes

"Fans of Marianne Moore and Robyn Schiff will delight in Avail, which weaves together stories of the poet's adolescent diagnosis of von Willebrand disease with her mother's breast cancer battle, all while exploring the lives of other women in the arts: Maria Callas, Edith Wharton, and Rita Hayworth, to name just a few. These formally deft, often arch lyrics expand the possibilities of the ekphrastic poem, interrogating how our aesthetic representations of suffering and illness render the true realities of pain invisible. In art, do we avail ourselves to physical suffering, or cast a veil over it? In this stunning and assured first collection, O'Luanaigh shows us how poetry does both."
--Paisley Rekdal, author of West: A Translation

"Refracted through the prisms of gender, history, and culture, the poems in Avail are as rhapsodic as they are fierce in their reckonings. With both "a screwball spring / in my step" and an eye on "the honest falsehood," Erin O'Luanaigh razes and rebuilds ideas about women's lives, taking on troublesome themes with wry formal panache. From the glamourous artifice of early Hollywood to the broken magnificence of opera, and while presenting accounts of a self moving from girlhood through womanhood, O'Luanaigh is a poet of tender intensity. Avail is an exquisite debut.
--Rick Barot, author of Moving the Bones

"I want to call this book careful. Also reckless. Measured and wild, brainy and passionate, serious and sparkling with wit. Not only in themselves but in how they speak to and across each other, these lyrics--lined and in prose--weave their impossibly delicate, improbably strong veil, wielding art not only to ornament but also to illuminate experience. Never have I seen such a mature, fully-realized debut."
--Katharine Coles, author of Time and Chance

"Avail shows us a world in which American popular culture mixes and meshes with European high culture, in which sestinas go wild, in which veils become vales, and in which lyric playfulness runs hard against chill form. This is an irrepressible debut collection, one to relish time after time."
--Kevin Hart, author of Wild Track: New and Selected Poems and Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood

"Erin O'Luanaigh's poems revel in classic Hollywood panache, paying brilliant homage to the femmes fatales in whose snowy VHS flicker the author came of age. Her lines zing and sizzle and smolder, revealing how the deepest love may be masked by the punchiest wit. This is not simply a book of cinephrastic marvels, though. Here, writing is also survival practice and spiritual inquiry. What music avails a woman who outlives a critical childhood illness and then nurses beloved others through their own travails? Recalling Keats's 'vale of Soul-making, ' O'Luanaigh's close-up shots with mortality give her insight into the heart's depths and the otherworldliness of creativity, the 'curious strength/ of a talent larger than the self.' Resurrected, glittering with life, her language effervescent as a flute of brut champagne, O'Luanaigh is a chanteuse lifting the veil of wonder."
--V. Penelope Pelizzon, author of A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye

"Reading and rereading Erin O'Luanaigh's poems--the liveliest, most happening, most electric I've encountered in ages--is like listening to a wiser, jazzier, more versatile incarnation of Don Marquis's Mehitabel the Cat recounting her adventures in this and a dozen past lives. Don't let that lead you to believe that O'Luanaigh is 'toujours gai.' She is a poet of rich moods, infinite notes. Her French motto is rather 'C'est la vie'--that's life, in all its irreducible splendor. She is splendid."
--Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems

About the Author

Erin O'Luanaigh worked as a jazz singer before receiving her MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Bad Lilies, AGNI, The Southern Review, Subtropics, 32 Poems, Nimrod, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Connecticut, she currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Avail is her first book.

Ange Mlinko is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Foxglovewise (FSG).