Black Lawrence Press, 2023
Winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition
Excerpts in The Boiler ◦ Vinyl Poetry and Prose ◦ The Rupture
In Life There Are Many Things
“Lucy Wainger is a brilliant poet whose ability to follow the visceral logic of her electrified imagination leads to lines so bright I want to eat them. She dazzles me with her deadpan humor and breaks my heart with her sudden utterances of love or hurt. While these poems are skillful and intelligent, they also give a feeling of guilelessness, the wild and askew openness children know and are taught to forget. Wainger is in touch with ungovernable forces. The lines she pulls down onto the page are virtually humming with energy; it is possible that when you read them you will produce sparks from your fingers and tongue.” –Heather Christle
Red Mare Press, 2026
Winner of the Micro Chapbook Prize
Excerpt in b l u s h
How to Write an Essay
How to Write an Essay is an attempt for the time being. These poems take seriously John D’Agata’s question-and-answer: “What is a lyric essay? It's an oxymoron: an essay that's also a lyric; a kind of logic that wants to sing; an argument that has no chance of proving anything.” Trying and failing, in other words, is a complete poetics. In lyrics and broken prose, Lucy Xiang-fu Wainger interrogates desire, memory, the dialectic between thinking and feeling, and what it means to have once been a child. Read and know that you are the exact, specific person to whom she is speaking.