she wants to tell you about the beehive under her bedroom window but she can’t get past the way it sounds like childhood / when she was little and god was a glass eye and nine spotlights yellow as egg yolks.

Death & the Maiden: Odes to the Dead Girls of Pop Culture is a look at popular culture from an oft-forgotten vantage; the girls left behind. Sixteen poems for sixteen fictional dead girls, some sad, some wistful, some furious, this chapbook is equal parts celebration and elegy.

You can buy a physical copy on Amazon or a pdf on Ko-fi

Praise for Death and the Maiden:

Lucy Hannah Ryan’s poetry collection Death & The Maiden oozes blood and gushes liquid strawberry from the core of bubblegum fleeting filmic (and literary) female flesh. Elegiac poetry at its finest, Death & The Maiden is elevated by the wisdom of the poet and its feminine focus, its understanding that “loveliness [is] its own kind of martyrdom.”

—Kristin Garth, author of Lollygagger & many other books

Death & the Maiden is not only a love letter to popular culture’s dead girls but an analysis of a self. It holds mirrors in carnival, full-length, and vanity form—even if “[n]ot everything gets to be a mirror.” Versions of the speaker glimmer in a panache palette of color, a divebar’s ashen haze, pushpinned pleading; promises, omens, whispered wishes; animation, cult classics, horror. Lucy Hannah Ryan reaches through the glass and the screen to suture a body of poetry that not only is a reflection, but reflects onto the reader.

—Tommy Blake, author of author of Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen and
Peanut [the cat] auditions as Courage […from Courage the Cowardly Dog]