NOW AVAILABLE FOR SALE
Lynne Jensen Lampe’s 1st Collection of Poems –
Talk Smack to a Hurricane
BOOK AWARDS (To Date)
Finalist, da Vinci Eye (for cover design—Eric Hoffer Award for Books) (Design by Robert Frede Kenter).
Finalist, First Horizon Award (for debut book—Eric Hoffer Award for Books)
Some info about the general contest:
Throughout the fall and winter, nearly 200 judges evaluated more than 2,400 books in 25 mutually exclusive category panels. When their work is complete, winners, runners-up, and honorable mentions for each category will be awarded, as well as the da Vinci Eye, Montaigne Medal, Medal Provocateur, First Horizon Award, best in Academic, Small, Micro, and Self-Published Press, and the overall Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize.
From design award email: “Your title is a da Vinci Eye finalist for the current Eric Hoffer Award season. The da Vinci Eye is given in honor of the Leonardo da Vinci and awarded to superior book covers artwork each year. This is a special distinction beneath the Eric Hoffer Award umbrella.”
We are honored to be publishing, Talk Smack to a Hurricane, the first full-length collection of poems by Lynne Jensen Lampe. Her work is beautifully crafted, narrative and experimental, a perfectly realized and searching construct, of memory and memoir wrapped in a searing ribbon of erudite style, embedded in both beauty and pain. This volume of poetics includes righteous and lyrical pieces, erasure work, photo-based ekphrastic, and delicate lines and tracings (like patterns of frost on winter windows) along a chronology of hope and recognition. Incisive, complex, distinctive and mournful, her texts are explorations of a mother/daughter relationship infused with the complications of caring for, relating and reacting to a mother’s schizophrenia and its impact on their life-long dynamic.
There is already a buzz-around this book. Before it has even officially launched, there have been media announcements and a limited tour has been arranged, one that is expanding as I write these notes. There have been and will be additional interviews, in print, to podcasts and more is in play; surely a harvest shall follow the short preorder phase and the upcoming late September, 2022 publication date and in-person launch at Skylark Books in Columbia, MO.
It is very difficult to write about trauma and our complicated relations with parents, family. It is arduous to write about mental illness, anger and anguish, how to evoke a loved one’s problematic impact on our own life journey. To get it right, to dig beneath surfaces into the balance of memory, institutional systems, ableist-norms, the social and political textures of history and interpersonal and intergenerational dynamics, is a skill, a gift, one honed, in the case of Lampe, over years of writing, rewriting, reconfiguring. Talk Smack to A Hurricane breaks rules and consolidates approaches to the production of fragmented narrative as truth-seeking, and truth-telling revelation, a rich encaustic in the realm of aesthetics. We are sitting closely with Lynne around a candle-lit table in the dark, her tones and melodies mesmeric, incisive, questioning, and ultimately healing. The book asserts a storyteller’s magic, it opens the doorway to other voices, it calls out for larger fabrics of social-narrative to build upon the frame of her work, whether solidly contained, or opening into a quilt of narratives. Whether it exudes or challenges the nature of fixed mechanisms towards indeterminacy, it is a collection opposing its own literary closure.
Lynne Jensen Lampe was born in Newfoundland, grew up in the deep south, USA, moved, flowed, and dealt intuitively with a world both frozen and opening to her, now claustrophobic, now expansive. Both loving and lacerating, this book enables or proposes cartographic pathways, ruminations of eloquence — stories of neglect and care, wonder and melancholy flower in a new garden. A prominent book-work, manifest in glorious lines, a richly converging sanctuary, Talk Smack to A Hurricane is a collection where both intimacy and public reconciling with personal pain reach towards an embrace of love in all its arch complications. Love burns through the pages of this remarkable book. We hope you enjoy and are moved by this work as much as we are.
– Robert Frede Kenter (Publisher, editor, midwife of Ice Floe Press).
Of this extraordinary volume, Poet Ed Skoog writes, “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.” – Author of Travelers Leaving for the City.
An Excerpt:
More Advance Praise:
Evocative and moving, a fascinating collection that captures the portrait of a mother’s madness.
—Catherine Cho, author of Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness
Lynne Jensen Lampe wants to know why women are “always explained away by flowers? We bud, blossom, open. We shrivel, wither, dry up.” Her sonorous poems leap across the selves of a life without bothering to please men or to foreground expectations of likable female voices. I was seduced by her tenderness, impressed by her formal variance, and delighted by the internal rhymes and rich, rollicking figurative language. I devoured the prose poems that experiment with font and typography to create ghosted erasures of poignant moments in mothered lives. I devoured them. Then I was devoured, in turn, by “Snaking Through Jump Creek Canyon,” and its blurring of memory and ideal in a mother. Certainly, I’d recommend devouring and being devoured by this book to almost anyone.
—Alina Ştefănescu, author of Dor and Ribald
Talk Smack to A Hurricane by Lynne Jensen Lampe is beautifully realized project, a soft cover 60 page book printed on 80-weight creme paper, with a matte cover. Dimensions: 6″ x 9″ inches. Book design and front-back covers by Robert Frede Kenter. Edited by Robert Frede Kenter and Moira J. Saucer. The book also includes additional acknowledgement, bio and advance writings pages by poet-comrades of both Lynne’s and Ice Floe Press.
ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY:
For orders and shipping in US dollars in the USA:
US$14.99 + US$5.99: 
For orders and shipping in Canadian dollars, inside Canada only:
CAD$19.65 + CAD$5.99:
For international orders and shipping outside the US, including Canada:
US$14.99 + US$7.99:
A family photo of Lynne & her mother at the side of her childhood home.
Lynne Jensen Lampe News & Links:
BOOKSTORES THAT CARRY TALK SMACK
Skylark Bookshop, Columbia, MO: https://www.skylarkbookshop.com
Yellow Dog Bookshop, Columbia, MO: https://www.skylarkbookshop.com
Spine Bookstore and Cafe, St. Louis, MO: https://www.spinebookstorecafe.com
Raven Book Store, Lawrence, KS: https://www.ravenbookstore.com
Crying Cat Books and Records, Murfreesboro, TN: https://cryingcatbooks.com
REVIEWS OF TALK SMACK
Inside Columbia: https://www.insidecolumbia.net/2022/10/01/local-authors-debut-book-of-poetry-confronts-difficult-past/
Columbia Daily Tribune: https://www.columbiatribune.com/story/entertainment/books/2022/09/26/columbia-poet-lynne-jensen-lampe-finds-healing-hurricane/8064854001/
Highland Park Poetry: http://www.highlandparkpoetry.org/reviewsthanks.html (you need to scroll way down, so I’m not sure it’s the best to post)
Masticadores USA: https://masticadoresusa.wordpress.com/2022/12/27/talk-smack-to-a-hurricane-by-lynne-jensen-lampe/
A 2020 feature on Lynne in the Columbia Tribune newspaper in Missouri.https://www.columbiatribune.com/story/entertainment/arts/2020/05/22/up-words/1162472007/
Launch
Images from the Official Launch Sept. 20, Skylark Books in Columbia, MO.
Official Book Launch at Skylark Bookshop, Sept. 20, 2022 (Columbia, Missouri):
Forthcoming Readings:
June 2: OSHER Friday Morning Book Talk, Columbia, MO
July 18: Normal (IL) Public Library
August 13: Well-Versed Words virtual reading and Q&A [I’ll try to get a link to you]
August 14: Raven Book Store (Lawrence, KS) with Courtney LeBlanc and Melissa Fite Johnson
September 19: Hearing Voices, Seeing Vision (Orr Street Studios, Columbia, MO) with Dame Good Writers [women’s writing group I’m in]
November 17: The Writers Place Reading Series, Kansas City, MO
Some past readings:
Baton Rouge Gallery
https://www.batonrougegallery.org/upcoming-events/2022/lynne-lampe-erin-little
Spine Bookstore & Cafe in St Louis on Oct 16 and at Downtown Poetry series in Joplin, MO, on October 17.
More Lynne: Interviews, Podcasts etc.
Fevers of The Mind Interview:
Fizza Abba interviews Lynne Jensen Lampe!
Eat the Storms Podcast, Dublin w/host Damien Donnelly
Radio Friends with Paul Pepper (video, aired on local NPR and PBS affiliates): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl32qjJgALg
Arts Calling with Jaime Alejandro (podcast): https://artscalling.com/2022/12/23/ep-77-lynne-jensen-lampe-a-mother-and-daughter-a-new-poetry-collection-talking-smack-to-a-hurricane/
Speaking of the Arts with Diana Moxon (radio show) (https://speakingofthearts.transistor.fm/episodes/two-poets-on-mothers-daughters-and-loss
https://news.yahoo.com/9-stories-shaped-columbias-arts-013607571.html [I’m mentioned in no. 4]
https://www.instagram.com/p/CnZmZmCOYU1/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D [Skylark IG post—2022 bestseller countdown, Talk Smack no. 18]
Lynne Jensen Lampe was born in Newfoundland but raised mostly in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her poems appear in many journals, including Figure 1, Olney Magazine, Yemassee, The American Journal of Poetry, and LIT Magazine. The poem “Stirring the Ashes” was a finalist for the 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. She lives with her husband and two dogs in mid-Missouri, where she edits academic books and journals.
For more about Lynne Jensen Lampe — Visit Lynne’s website:
IceFloe Press 