---

Here is an unflinching masterwork of unpicking the familial ties, the “white lies,” we live with and how we forge ourselves separate from them. (from a review by Lorcan Black, author of Strange Husbandry)

---

“Experimental” is a word often thrown around haphazardly in aesthetic criticism, but Crystal Stone’s poetry is experimental in the most rewarding sense: searching, honest, continually discovering new forms that might allow the mystery to speak. And what mysteries live in her words: family, fortune, our wayward stewardship of the earth. “The sun is visible over the lake,” she writes, and her poems can do that: humbly, lovingly, they carry us down into depths, up into the light.

Joseph Fasano, author of The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing

Crystal Stone’s new book, White Lies, offers us a clear-eyed look at the damage a family can do, the perils that come with avoiding the truth, and a poet’s swerving, weaving resilience. And Stone is deft in exposing the costs of that resilience. She says: “Each year, I age/ more than I mean to.” and “Loneliness takes more energy/than love. In one version of the poem, I believe this.” The book is wildly creative and includes floor plans, cootie catchers, ekphrastic poems, and other treats. Stone’s syntax is beautiful, often amusing, and sometimes wily. Stone can shift the subject while maintaining the sounds she is working with, she can mislead you for a moment with an agile line break. For instance, “Love is a nostalgia aloof/ a roof is supposed to keep/ the rainwater out of the living/ room …” This book invites the reader into its generous landscape and makes us participants. As the poet says, “Don’t leave me alone./ All of this damage is already done.”

Donna Spruijt-Metz, author of General Release from the Beginning of the World

Crystal Stone writes, “Maybe the webs remember” and “The spirits are not fooled”-in an offhand way, getting to the heart of her collection. The ghost of want and memory, fogged or true, haunts Stone’s electric collection, White Lies. These ghosts are everywhere, like shapeshifters, the apparent shifting of familial memory and its gaslit nature is both fuel and drive for these poems. There is a sense, too, of what more could be had were circumstances different, a meditation on the inheritance handed us through history-what can you build with the tools you’re given, even when those tools are lopsided and ill-fit for use? This is a collection of bold, glittering language that doesn’t shy away from its hard questions about the self and the self’s past but races at it, full-force, utterly unbridled. These are poems operating at full canter, lashing toward the truth at the center, to a full-fledged woman finding that, at the center of herself, there is herself. Here is an unflinching masterwork of unpicking the familial ties, the “white lies,” we live with and how we forge ourselves separate from them.

Lorcan Black, author of Strange Husbandry

This book is both a gut punch and a glorious gulp of air. Stone writes with elegance and simplicity about heart-rending topics and then incorporates creative forms, like floor plans and Snapple facts, leaving me breathless with their whimsy, deepened by the intense topics she writes on them. White Lies will stay with me for a long time.

Joann Renee Boswell, author of Meta-Verse!: it’s going to be interesting to see how yesterday goes

---