“Lillo Way inhabits the voice of her grandmother, after whom she was named, in these deeply felt, deeply researched poems that capture the spirited world of circus performers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Tracing the trajectory of a young girl as she learns to “fly” alongside her brothers in Britain, reaches the heights of fame as a young woman in Europe, and matures into motherhood and old age in America, Flying is a tribute to the thrill of performance and the power of family.”

Read the review in Crab Creek Review

A gorgeous book, handsewn in red thread, with red endpapers, that would make a lovely gift.

Lend Me Your Wings

“Rich in music and in imagination, Lillo Way’s Lend Me Your Wings is a celebration and a joy.”

The poems in this award-winning collection take the reader on a ride with things that fly, including the poet’s grandmother (who was an aerialist with Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth), birds, ghosts, insects, ancestors, an angel or two…as well as humans attempting to flee. Arresting images by artist Rachel Brumer interlace the poems in this extraordinary collection, enhancing their sense of wonder and surprise.

The manuscript was a finalist for The Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, The May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, The Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award, The Barry Spacks Poetry Prize, and The Brighthorse Prize. One of the poems, “Offering,” won the 2018 E.E. Cummings Award from New England Poetry Club, and another, “Appropriation,” was awarded a Florida Review 2018 Editors’ Prize.

In her endorsement of the book, the great poet, Ellen Bass, writes:

“Rich in music and in imagination, Lillo Way’s Lend Me Your Wings is a celebration and a joy. She begins with poems that capture the thrill of her grandmother’s aerial feats in the Barnum and Bailey circus ‘It’s about the letting go—his eyes, / your arms, the trapeze, its song.’ And then moves on to a world full of wonder in unexpected places. But she does not ignore the grit of life, nor does she look away from the truly terrible. In ‘Offering,’ which is dedicated to David S. Buckel, the Environmentalist and LAMBDA lawyer who self-immolated in 2018, she writes ‘Unbuckle him, unburn him, un- / fuel his futile flames, unfossil / the fumes, re-gold them. Fold / him in our unarmed arms.’ In ‘Broken,’ she writes ‘I hear birds, clear as glass, in sounds we call song / or we call language, and which the birds call / nothing. ’That’s close to a description of these poems. That ‘nothing’ that holds everything.”

—Ellen Bass, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; author of Indigo, Copper Canyon Press.