Books

A Child of Many Waters, Lavender Ink, 2020.

Most of this remarkable book was originally type-written in the street as the author, working as a poet-for-hire in New Orleans and other cities, observed the scenes around her as well as her inner world. These prose transcripts of time and place, written around and between poems, explore language as a tool of pilgrimage and spiritual engagement. The book embodies elements of poetry, fiction, memoir, and collaborative performance art, as the spectacle of the typewriter makes the public square aware of itself appearing on the page.

“In Erin Lierl’s beautiful and revelatory work, A Child of Many Waters, we are repeatedly thrown into the midst of things. Each moment is a wonder-filled, ironic, dialectical beginning that is a non-beginning...Some will be struck by the sadness that pervades many of these moments. They take us into the world of samsara, the insubstantial world of constant change, of suffering and loss...But that is far from the end of the story. The book also announces the good news that the world of samsara is at the same time the world of nirvana, a world of joy, of the sacred, of deliverance.” -John P. Clark

"Expansive and vibrantly metaphysical" -B.D. Navarre, HASH