Reliquaries by Liz Kicak

Kicak’s seasoned debut is an ornate reliquary that holds each poem like a sacred object waiting to be revered. Lush with the often-contradictory beauty and terror of Florida’s flora and fauna, Kicak’s speakers show a family as complex as the landscape they call home. A beautiful and engaging study of the lyric, this is a new voice that can’t be turned away from.

–Natalie Scenters-Zapico: https://www.nataliescenterszapico.net/about-me

In this striking debut, Kicak lends her narrative prowess and keen eye for fresh image to a new ekphrastic: Reliquaries paints the nuances of gender, geography, and the interior topography of identity and faith with a brush all her own. These poems house rare insight, boasting a fresh take on inheritance both poetic and familial, and are finely crafted indeed.

–Meg Day: https://www.megday.com/about

Liz Kicak’s poems are skeptical devouts. Her impatience with the figures long written onto women in their various roles—sister, daughter, lover—does not destroy her faith in metaphor, but rather spurs her to overwrite them with her own figural reliquary.  She claims for herself the ghost orchid, the queen bee, the operculum of a fish, each an article of her enduring belief in metaphor’s capacity to allow something—even a self—to defy definition.  “Let me live forever” Kicak prays, “submerged in this river of the unsayable.”  These poems invite us into that mysterious water alongside her.

–Kimberly Johnson: https://kimberly-johnson.com/