Description

Poetry Northwest Editions, paperback

Publication Date: June 25, 2022

Publisher Marketing: InMorality Play, Lauren Hilger forges a restless path between the impressionable folly of youth and the boundlessness of individual becoming. A motley bildungsroman of fierce imagination,Morality Playreveals, and revels in, the paradox inherent in its title, angling for a tender virtue in the sensuousness of words. “Raised on a fast pencil, a sound expiring,” Hilger reminds us that “From the world’s first cities, it was always a woman / telling the future.” Like a wild song fluent in, or flung against, awkward self-delusion and constrictive cultural norms,Morality Playoffers a vision of womanhood as expansive as lucid dreaming, where all the “wrong words” become our “mother tongue.”