Lye poetically and thematically follows the ingredients of soap making-ash, water, and oil-to explore how one might wash their hands of a messy and traumatic past. If ash represents the frail damage after fire has its way, and if water represents the emotional response thereafter, then these elements would combine only to create lye: a stinging, caustic compound that reminds too much of the original flame. Yet this is exactly how generational trauma continues-a cycle of burning and burning.
It would seem the final and often-missing ingredient to transform lye into something cleansing is nothing but oil: softness and levity. How might we caress such a soothing balm onto our rawest wounds? How might we turn the endless cycle of reactivity into something new, fresh, and fragrant? Lye doesn’t balk in its offering of candor, poetry, and memory as it suggests its answer to these important questions.
Through epigrammatic memories and cinematic scenes, the poems in Lye recover moments of developmental trauma to re-author a powerful self-mythology. It is a self-mythology that transforms, like ash and water, through organic material, chemical reactions, and electric epiphany. Sunshine’s voice moves from innocent to caustic to easeful across the poem’s three sections and the old narrative-it’s punitive, paternal, and biblical limitations-is cleansed away. In turn, they become the “creator / of (their) own bright and / terrifying world.” I’m warmed by this Kentuckiana poet and the spirit in their poems!
Joy Priest, author of Horsepower
How is a daughter shaped, when the border between intimacy and violence is razor thin? When “touch is only ever / a sexual invitation” and conversations are laced with dread? In a family where men happen to women like catastrophes? She is shaped with “sweat and ash.” Needing to be “born / again and again.” She becomes “a dual / spirit, split and burning,” a “pale and terrified stranger.” However Lye is not only a coming of age story but a survivor’s tale. Lately’s speaker survives by recognizing that “hurt daughters become / hurt mothers” and “This is the truth / every daughter must swallow: / only we can save ourselves.” They heal into their whole self by finding an alternative path from “our line / of mothers / who believed every word their fathers said.” Lye is a book about toxic fathering and self-rescue. Readers will want to hang on to the very end to discover “What grows / in the garden / at the end of the world.” A fierce and fearless debut.
Jill Khoury, author of earthwork
Lye holds up a mirror to the journey taken to reach the deepest parts of ourselves. Sunshine Lately combines memory with poetic processing in such a way that you travel, not only through pages but also through self. May we always remember the liberating power of honesty. Lye is liberation, self-discovery, and a portal to what is possible when one chooses to take the journey through it all.
Korie Griggs, author of Suffer Well: Poems for the Grieving
Just as toxicity and remnants of burning can be combined to create something that washes things clean, the poems in Lye use the raw material of generational trauma to chronicle a journey toward love and hope. With honest, clear vision, Lye traces the fallibility and failures of family and shimmers with the strength of a new self forged in their wake. These poems-like oil, lye, and ash-flow, sting, and burn as they cleanse.
Donna Vorreyer, author of Unrivered
I read Sunshine’s Lye in one great gulp and came up gasping for air, cheering and weeping. From the opening preface to the epilogue at the end, I was gripped by this story of resilience and survival. Lately speaks to their mother, “I wish you would have lived with nothing in your belly but lightning.” And by the end (spoiler alert), Lately realizes “all I have to do is become something electric now.” And they do-this book is electricity itself. “Keep telling me to be quiet,” Sunshine says, “Then pull the lever and see if you’ll get cherries or bombs.”
Joann Renee Boswell, author of Meta-Verse!: it’s going to be interesting to see how yesterday goes
