Mind Lit in Neon

Bat City Review co-founder and former Michener Poetry Fellow R.J. Lambert's much-anticipated debut poetry collection brings together pop music and fine art, celebrities and philosophers, and nature and neon with a candid and curious sensibility. Featuring the winner of the Patricia Cleary Miller Award, an Atlanta Review International Merit Award, and a Pushcart Prize nomination, each finely honed lyric poem "persists in a small flowering."

From Justin Jannise, former Editor in Chief of Gulf Coast and author of How to Be Better by Being Worse: "The wind blows through these poems, as if through a sax or a bassoon-the limitless delights of nature activating the narrowest corridors of human invention to produce strange and melancholic melodies. "Sometimes the quiet conjugates me like a verb," R.J. Lambert writes, summarizing this book's attention both to silence and to language, and to the poet's own two-way portal between them: his titular (and singular) "mind." A series of poems devoted to "streaming" music, from Chopin and Mozart to Whitney Houston and Frank Ocean, demonstrate Lambert's virtuosic ear, while his true forbears are Auden, Bishop, Merrill, and Doty (though he does a killer impression of Stein). With grace, grit, wit, and winsomeness, Lambert forms out of the quiet atoms of verse a fierce and lively hand."

From Mary Ann Samyn, author numerous poetry collections, including Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance: "In Mind Lit in Neon, R.J. Lambert imagines a world where mother, father, and brother mingle with Camus and Borges and Stein, Nancy Reagan and Whitney Houston. Let the revelations come as they may, this world is alive to itself and moving to the music Lambert paints: all our days and nights: the siren of an ambulance, the first robin, a morning's breeze-so many sounds vivid against the skin." -Mary Ann Samyn, author of Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance.

R.J. Lambert (he, him, his) is a queer writer, editor, and teacher based in Charleston, South Carolina. Surviving the 1999 Columbine High School shootings fostered his interest in the healing power of writing in response to individual and communal traumas, which he has explored through scholarly research, presentations, and poetry. He was a James A. Michener Poetry Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where he co-founded and co-edited the journal Bat City Review. His poems have since appeared widely in journals and anthologies. He recently won the 2021 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from New Letters and was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize by The Worcester Review. This is his debut poetry collection. R.J. teaches science writing and health communication at the Medical University of South Carolina. Find him online at rj-lambert.com.