ABOUT

The Hermit is a catalog of thoughts concerning art and experience. Layering fragments of dreams, lists, games, conversations, poems, and notebooks, Lucy Ives offers an intimate look into one writer's practice—"The worst is my imagination: lushly underscoring everything."

READ

Excerpt at BOMB.

Excerpts at The Poetry Foundation.

PRAISE

"Readers are invited to an inner conversation as the poet grapples with the idea of writing, the history of it, the creative act itself, and also the text as an object, asking permission to be seen (much as Ives permits herself to feel), to exist in the eyes of others, and to participate in the canon. What saves the book from being merely being a treatise or a personal journal is that the reader is taken along on the creative journey; Ives muses about another author or a technique, such as the idea of description, and the page transforms into an experimental playground where she produces gorgeous passages of lush imagery."

— Publisher's Weekly

"'This is a poem about trying to write a novel,' Ives writes, daring us to read her poem The Hermit like a novel, or at least as a poet’s desire to write a novel. 'When I was 13 I swore to myself that I would become a novelist,' she continues. In fact she already has: Her impressive publications credits include both poetry (including her excellent collection Orange Roses) and even a novel, nineties, a bildungsroman focused on a young woman coming of age during that decade. She is an editor for Triple Canopy, a magazine and arts organization committed to 'resisting the atomization of culture' and who assembled an installation as part of the 2015 Whitney Biennial. Earlier this year it was announced she’d sold her second novel to Penguin, titled Impossible Views of the World. Ives hasn’t just fulfilled the promise to made by her 13-year-old self, she has documented what it took to get her there. In clumsier hands, this would come off as diaristic. In Ives’s, it’s art."

— The Culture Trip

"Like the paintings of Agnes Martin or the films of Nathaniel Dorsky, the most important character in Ives’s prose is its reader. In the white space underneath these notes my own mind’s wanderings take on what is not exactly an importance, but a space for reading and thinking. I move around in this writing, and become aware of my moving around within it, and consider not only the shape of the writing, but my own shape as its reader. In other words, Ives’s writing encourages its readers to consider their own power and form among the reality they encounter."

— MAKE Magazine

"Throughout The Hermit recur images of dwellings, both simple and extravagant, and they take on the weight of allegory from the outset. The first of these appear in '3,' where Ives’s author notes: 'I write, inconclusively, ‘All culminating in the image of a dwelling: It indicates a secret life…’' This secret life, for the poet-critic, comes into existence only where the mystery of desired knowledge can be apprehended, where she can sit down by the hearth and be with it. She dreams this is where her path will lead her."

— Full Stop

"Imagine if all you had was phenomenology, and then that faded, making every legibility left behind look like scare quotes around the word "thought." Lucy Ives is smart in that heart-breaking way that can make a spare, suspicious, elegant work of anti-poetry out of the silent treatment between ideas and those who have them. 'You cannot win,' says The Hermit, in that cognitive territory unoccupied by ease."

— Anne Boyer

"Stray thoughts are the protagonists of The Hermit—they might be the after effects of intense focus, yet come across as decidedly eccentric in their resistance to systems (i.e. genre) that might dull their prismatic luminescence. Here they deliver proof of parataxis's poiesis. Ives's exquisite take on ellipsis as realism is a dream, as both vision and something that fully satisfies a wish."

— Mónica de la Torre