Poetry Collection – Jill Szoo Wilson

Manuscript Submitted: The Giving of Weight by Iris Lennox

Today I sent the manuscript for my first poetry collection to a professional formatter.

The book will be published under my literary pen name, Iris Lennox, and is titled The Giving of Weight.

For the last several months, I’ve been moving poems around, cutting others entirely, arguing with line breaks, changing titles, adding new work, removing old work, and occasionally staring out windows and calling it research.

Today, it became someone else’s turn to work on it for a while.

Now we wait.

And, apparently, obsess over typography.

Cheers!

The Desert Series by Iris Lennox

Iris Lennox is the pen name I use for poems that gather around image, landscape, memory, faith, and the spiritual weight of ordinary things.

The poems belong to the same larger body of work as my essays on theatre, performance, communication, and attention, but they enter that work through a more lyrical form. Where my theatre essays often move through analysis, argument, and dramatic structure, the Iris Lennox poems begin with physical encounter: red dust, desert wind, silence, Scripture, stars, and the strange way wild places sharpen both sight and thought.

Here are five poems from The Desert Series, written during a recent trip through the high desert.

This summer, I’ll be publishing my first collection of poetry under the name Iris Lennox.

The primary home for Iris Lennox poetry is IrisLennox.com.