I’d Rather be lightning BOOK REVIEWS
BLURBS
"Nancy Woo's I'd Rather Be Lightning is a necessary invocation. It's a handbook, spellbook, and remembered lucid dream to guide us in and through these times. Clear-eyed about the climate crisis while brimming with love for humans and more-than-humans, this debut collection is a powerful force of language and hope." Tamiko Beyer
"I read the collection with care, afraid I’d miss a single gem about our planetary crisis, along with Woo’s wise and kind eye towards us flawed humans (“Everyone you disagree with//is right in some way”), and the joie de vivre and optimism she offers us, alongside the great existential dread so beautifully depicted, in the playfulness of her poems." Elizabeth J. Coleman
"Nancy Lynée Woo’s I’d Rather Be Lightning is a riotous and candid collection of ecopoems that traverse landscapes and species to tell the story of our changing world. She reports 'Earth’s problems are not getting/ any smaller.' While hope for humanity is ever-present in her work, Woo is in search of the 'eye of life' and isn't afraid to examine the irreparable damage to the Earth and its non-human inhabitants. Using bold language and body-level perceptions, Woo frankly reminds us, 'Just because you want to survive doesn’t mean you will.' Jessica Gigot
"Nancy Lynee Woo's dreadfully charming ecopocalypse I'D RATHER BE LIGHTINING is such a beautiful, jarring, funny, and wild collection of poems, capturing the hopes and fears of a young Angeleno at the cusp of the end of the world.” Pete Hsu
“The poems in Nancy Lynée Woo’s I’d Rather be Lightning read like a love letter to Earth. Woo calls on nature to deliver messages of hope and possibility. The language is free and curious, exploratory, and meditative in its most powerful moments, calling us into stillness. There is warning in these poems but also hope. There’s a rooting of the words in ordinary and everyday wonder, exposing the interconnectedness of all: ‘Considering times like these, it’s necessary/to talk about how food grows: in stalks, on trees, in bushes, underground/where worms make magic of our scraps.’ Woo’s fragments make their own magic, elevating political and environmental concerns into language that engages the reader in necessary questions of what it means to be alive today.” Pallavi Dhawan
bearing the juice of it all
Cover art by Kelli Woo
Nancy Lynée Woo’s poetry collection, Bearing the Juice of It All, is a dazzling collection—it takes on the perils of being a woman—with aplomb, scope, humor, compassion, and generosity. The sheer variety of forms reveals this poet’s ambition—from lyric poems to prose poems to poems about chicken hearts, Woo puts all of her immense gifts and talents on open display. Woo’s poems shift and turn, swerve and take flight, all the while, taking the willing reader along with them. Woo clearly has a rich and imaginative mind and the lucky reader is lifted along and by the end, she has taken our hearts, morphed them, and “[given them] back/bigger than” when she found them.
-Victoria Chang, author of The Boss
Bearing the Juice of It All is a cry for women to be aware of their lives internally and externally, and percolates through the arising voice of a feminist, Nancy Lynée Woo. As the voice emerges in her chapbook so does her call to social awareness. In “A Woman Alone” the reader and narrator have found their purpose to rage in an awakening of social feminism and sing out, A woman alone is rumbling and rolling, and like this book always moving forward. Even the last poem keeps the reader moving forward on this journey, as we are left with the ultimate question, How do you know this is all of it? I hope this is not even close to all of it, because Nancy Lynée Woo is a voice that needs to be heard and continue for many books to come.
-Denise R. Weuve, author of The Truck Driver's Daughter
In her collection, Bearing the Juice of It All, poet Nancy Lynée Woo peels and twists and pulls at the different skins of womanhood, exploring the journey of growth and the reflection of past, and gets to the seed of it all. She does this with both masterful technique and a keen eye for language; these are nurtured poems. Their vibrancy and feel prove the poet was patient with them, waiting only until they were at their peak ripeness before picking them from her heart’s branches and presenting them to us to savor. Bite into them and let their sticky sweetness run down your chin.
-Eric Morago, author of What We Ache For