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by Jamie L. Smith (Author)
The poems and essay fragments in The Flightless Years investigate the relationship between memory, myth, and meaning. When our heroes fail us, and we can't reconcile our love for someone with their actions, do myths and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves help or harm? Over the course of The Flightless Years, a beloved friend commits a violent crime, a mother's mental illness destabilizes the speaker's childhood, and the speaker's own addiction wreaks havoc on her relationships. Still, Icarus flew before he fell, and Persephone returned from the underworld. The figures present in these pages, however flawed, find their thrills, and revel in beauties ranging from the crushed glass that glitters like stars on the sidewalk to the greater cosmos and constellations.
The collection is structured around fragments of the lyric essay Flawed Mythologies which was selected by David Lazar as winner of Tusculum Review's 2020 Nonfiction Prize and published as a limited-edition chapbook under the title Mythology Lessons. This piece was listed as notable in Best American Essays, 2021 and received the inaugural Louise DeSalvo Memorial Memoir Prize (Hunter College 2020). Poems from this collection were selected by Diana Khoi Nguyen as winner of the Levis Poetry Prize (University of Utah 2020), and appear in publications including Southern Humanities Review, Red Wheelbarrow, The Write Launch, and elsewhere.
