Radium Girl is available from your local bookseller or on Amazon.
“[A] sage debut. . . . Lipkes’s holistic perspective offers uncommon insight into the unrelenting and miraculous will of the body and consciousness.”—Publishers Weekly
The poems in Radium Girl hold dual citizenship in the land of the sick and the kingdom of the well. The point where illusion ends and reality begins is never clear, as Celeste Lipkes evokes saints, magicians, scientists, and caregivers in the process of surviving both medical illness and medical training. Slippery metaphors of rabbits in hats, doves in cages, and elaborate escapes explore the inhabitation of a female body as a kind of powerful and violent performance—where the magician’s trick of cutting a woman in half is never as far away as we’d like.
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Praise:
“In Radium Girl, Celeste Lipkes deftly conjures a world replete with fear and wonder. Like the perfected trick of a skilled illusionist or the inventive calculation of an engineer—these poems juggle the tropes of magic and medicine in order to track their speaker’s unlikely transformation from dangerously ill patient to practicing physician. Who is the rabbit, the poet asks? And who is the magician? If we are each our own Houdini, what is the lock we are trying to pick? Formally varied, sonically rich, and thematically complex, this dazzling first collection reminds its readers of the longing behind the original lyric impulse, the wish to execute a narrow escape.” -Kathleen Graber, The River Twice
“While this collection is an astoundingly constructed myth, then, it does not resolve the wonders it summons. . .it does not end in certainty, trimming the “other possibilities” from its schemas. Rather, it bears the traces of its construction; it tenders the reader a coupon good for its deconstruction or, maybe, reconstruction. It shimmers between mythography and mythology, between being made and being un- and re-made. Put another way: Radium Girl is no fait accompli but, instead, a gorgeous, assailable performance, splendid and incomplete.” -Jane Zwart, review in Plume
“In this sage debut, Lipkes, a psychiatrist, combines her literary and scientific backgrounds in poems that explore the body’s mysteries and examine the relationship of mind and viscera. These pieces center on illness, escapism, illusion, healing, and the intersection of these subjects, utilizing metaphors of silence, emptiness, and confinement, as well as the magician’s white rabbit and dove. In a poem in which a magician murders a dove to obscure it and reveal another, she makes a wry request for transparency: “The kind of trickery I need to see: kill/ a bird and don’t pretend to bring it back.” Lipkes’s insight is punctuated by the personal suffering she’s endured through Crohn’s disease and the resilience that has moved her forward, her sardonic temperament assisting: “When I ask God if I will feel normal ever again,/ I take the silence to mean maybe.” . . .Lipkes’s holistic perspective offers uncommon insight into the unrelenting and miraculous will of the body and consciousness.” -Publisher’s Weekly
“In the breathtaking ‘escape room’ of Celeste Lipkes’s Radium Girl, our ardent guide dons, by turns, the snow-flaked robe of patient, the white coat of physician, the lustrous cape of magician. The word ‘magic’ is rooted in the PIE ‘magh’—‘to be able, to have power’—and in this radiant debut, body and mystery exchange their secrets about what can and cannot be controlled—in illness, in love, and in the salvific art of poetry itself.” -Lisa Russ Spaar, Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and Paradise Close: A Novel
“Celeste Lipkes, poet and clinical psychiatrist, is Dr. Oliver Sacks and Stevie Smith rolled into one. With perspicacity, her luminous first book meditates on many odd juxtapositions including Houdini and medical school, Crohn’s disease and love. Dividing her idiosyncratic lyrics into four sections—‘Rabbit,’ ‘Dove,’ ‘Hemicorporectomy,’ and ‘Escape’—Radium Girl brings us close to a young speaker under pressure to honor the Hippocratic oath and make her way in the world. . .Her lines lanced clean as she puts entomology, Eve, and villanelles under her microscope. Annie Dillard said poets to be poets should study something else. Lipkes did, to great success: by the last page, her poetry radiates with talent, acuity, and originality.” —Spencer Reece, The Clerk’s Tale and The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir
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Additional Press:
The Laurel of Asheville Feature of Radium Girl