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If a Dolphin
Paperback
Publisher Price: $20.00
ISBN13: 9781946276018
Publisher: Washington Prize
Published: May 12 2026
Pages: 104
Weight: 0.33
Height: 0.25 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In her debut collection of poems If a Dolphin, Lindsay Remee Ahl explores the unstable and often disorienting rebirth of a drowned identity across space and time. She skillfully blurs the visceral and everyday with dreamlike, shifting consciousness in poems that stretch the boundaries of poetry's conventions. Borrowing language from multiple voices, Ahl's purpose is to articulate the path of a renewed identity, even as time and place remain ever-changing and unpredictable.
Says Daisy Fried: In Lindsay Ahl's poems everything morphs and moves and everything dark is paired with something bright. Holes open into water, present disappears into past, and sometimes reading If a Dolphin can feel like drowning-but that's okay because in this book, drowning and surviving go hand in hand. The effect is of spending time in a world simultaneously dreamed and tremendously real-a disconcerting and beautiful place to live.
Connie Voisine adds: Call it time-travel, call it Dante's Inferno with dolphins as Virgil. Walter Benjamin, with his black suitcase of writing makes an appearance, as do gryphons bursting into flight from ramparts and skyscrapers. The speaker returns to the drowning of a girl, and this girl becomes a woman who moves through wars, cities, and seas. What a gorgeous epistemology of love's power, set against the tragedies of the human-made world.
And Joanne Dominique Dwyer adds: Ahl's writing is full of grace, potency and out of the box surprise. Her poems are narrated by a girl drowned in a lake who continues to age in the afterlife and is capable of time travel, by the lifeguard who could not save her, by dolphins, World War II spies and occasionally by Ahl herself. The poetic microbiome of Ahl's mind is boundless. The collection is a reflection of her ability to question time, place, the afterlife, and the fiction we adhere to that there is such a thing as an individual. Ahl's premise is not based on mysticism as much as particle physics. Yet, the poems in If a Dolphin read like a wild Tibetan Bardo journey, shattering and enriching.
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