Lifting Myself By My Own Toes by BD Feil

Throughout the pages of Lifting Myself By My Own Toes, Feil casts a clear and thoughtful eye upon the wide range of human experience, from the mundane to the apocalyptic. Feil’s poems see revelation in everyday objects, in the majesty of the natural world, in a simple curl of brow. Poetry lovers will find much to enjoy here.

–Eric Tucker, editor of Plainsongs journal and Corpus Callosum Press

BD Feil’s Lifting Myself by My Own Toes skillfully looks beyond “the crank and grind” of the everyday, back to events and words “past memory.” These poems know monsters can be real, as one speaker says, and that “grief repeats like a radish.” Through it all, Feil crafts a careful recollection of an Ohio childhood and the days that followed after, knowing that even as “the bitter end is / Near,” the important thing is “Just don’t stop scribbling whatever you do.”

–Lisa Ampleman, author of two full-length poetry collections—Romances (LSU Press, 2020) and Full Cry (NFSPS Press, 2013), winner of the Stevens Manuscript Competition sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies—and the chapbook I’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You

“Feil’s poems are full of quick, sinuous language that coils around you, ensnares you. The familiar objects and actions of everyday life collide in frameworks both odd and fresh, creating a friction that dismantles and rebuilds our usual perceptions. These are poems to move through, that will shape-shift with new meaning upon each read.

–Suzanne Grove, Associate Editor CRAFT”

Lifting Myself By My Own Toes is on the chimerical mission of recovering the poetic image as an old dream where syntax “can’t quite make out its / true shape.” There’s a darkness in Feil’s inscrutable poems, a sense and sound not disparate and neither familiar; something new takes root inside these worlds. Neither purely lyric nor distinctly narrative, the poems here are profoundly unique in their ability–via a meandering unsentimentality and a playful interdependence–to just barely avoid collapsing under their own magnitude. I had to wean myself off their curiosity, their forthrightness, their vulnerable beauty. Not reclamation, not redemption, but something closer to atonement, for “From the fields then there was no vista / only rumored horizon,” and here Feil leads us holding both our hands and our hearts.

–Gary McDowell, author of Aflame