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The Breakdown Atlas
& Other Poems
by Lauren Tivey
Excerpts
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Bio
Lauren Tivey has been living in China for the past two years, where she works as an English Literature teacher in the American Program at a Chinese high school. Lauren received her undergraduate degree in poetry and literature from Granite State College, and her MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she was the recipient of the 2008 Jack Myers Grant for Outstanding Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Literary Burlesque, Blue Lake Review, The Legendary, Message in a Bottle, Gutter Eloquence, SPARK, Word Salad, Snakeskin, Sierra Nevada Review, Red River Review, Medicinal Purposes, Timber Creek Review, Sahara, Deuce Coupe and Red Owl, among other publications. An avid traveler, she has also written a number of travel stories, which appear on both mightymercury.com and expatwomen.com. She lives for poetry, photography, travel, and adventure.
Reviews
Lauren Tivey’s poems confront the reader’s body like shots of tequila—if, that is, the reader has a knowledge of its bite and substance, and knows how to temper the hits with the citrus of lime and the truth of salt. She shies away from nothing, yet, as though you’ve been friends a long time and have met regularly at the bar, she encourages you to experience tough realities. But here’s the kicker: These poems will drink you under the table. You may stagger home, but they’re always ready for last call.
Sascha Feinstein, Misterioso & Black Pearls
With raw energy and in-your-face language, Lauren Tivey's The Breakdown Atlas is a wild journey that begins with the harsh reality of “a rotting carcass” of (a) marriage. Through her poems we experience the life of a newly independent woman, feel the pain of a lover's breakdown, and desperation in a Hong Kong hooker hotel. She expresses a mother's deep love for her distant daughter for whom she'll pick “bouquets of devotion and remorse.” Her poetry can be raunchy, as in “satyrs copulating with witches”; titillating “like a Geisha, opening the flower of her mouth”; yet tender, as she describes “the wind chime of your laughter.” Lauren Tivey's poems left me breathless, with a desire to live through her wild ride again and again. She writes in one poem that “the kettle screeched holy hell”, and so does her poetry!
Norma Ketzis Bernstock, Don't Write a Poem for Me After I'm Dead
Lauren Tivey’s “animal-tough” poems about relationships are stunning, enticing, and brutally honest. kicks readers in the gut over and over again, but somehow manages to leave them with a sense of hope “in spite of our broken, journeyed bodies”. I absolutely loved this book!
Maureen A. Sherbondy, Weary Blues and Scar Girl
Breakdown Atlas review in Examiner.com
Purchase The Breakdown Atlas & Other Poems here.
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