Well, I’m a lucky man
With fire in my hands

—The Verve, “Lucky Man”

This epigraph starts off Lynnell Edwards’s newest chapbook with poems inspired by glassblowing in the “hot shop”.

“Through empathy and penetrating observation, Edwards goes deep inside the art of glassmaking. What she brings back in the form of poems is fascinating—she has absorbed and passes on to us the jargon of the guild, as well as the cautions and the glories the ‘kings of the hot shop’ encounter on the way to finished creations. It is a small, self enclosed universe, and Edwards its sympathetic cosmologist.”

– Jeffrey Skinner

Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop (or, What Breaks) will be released on June 15th. If you think you’ll be too busy with the Lexington Poetry Month Writing Challenge, we’ll go ahead and let you pre-order! Then, halfway through a stressful month of daily poem writing, you get a cool gift delivered straight to your door!

Or, if you’re more of an “in-person” kind of person, Lynnell Edwards is having a release party at Flame Run Hot Shop in Louisville, Kentucky on June 19th.

photo by John Nation

Lynnell Edwards is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Covet (Red Hen Press, 2011). Her short fiction and book reviews have also appeared widely in such literary journals as Pleiades, American Book Review, New Madrid, and The Connecticut Review. She is Associate Professor of English at Spalding University, and prior to that, a faculty member at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. Lynnell is a graduate of Centre College, the center of the glass-blowing universe in Kentucky.