Lindsey Royce

Lindsey Royce’s poems have been published in many journals, including Aeolian Harp #8, #7 and #5; Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts; The New York Quarterly; Poet Lore; and Washington Square Review. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. Royce’s first poetry collection, Bare Hands, was published in September of 2016 by Turning Point; Play Me a Revolution, her second collection, published in the Silver Concho Poetry Series by Press 53 in September, won second place for poetry in the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Awards. The Book of John is her third collection and is dedicated to her husband, John Kevin Bouldin, who died young from stomach cancer. It is Royce’s tribute to him and to those we all love.

Lindsey Royce has given us a beautifully observed book of love and remembrance, loss and endurance. You will be moved. You might even be changed. It is shining with life.
—Luis Alberto Urrea

Play Me a Revolution is a collection that gives an entirely new meaning to the term “poetic justice.” —Connie Post

Sample Poem from The Book of John

THE YOUNG BUCK

Over a foot of fresh snow fell, that mystical
salve. I crutch through heavy drifts
trailing our naughty dog, Lib, jeans soaked to my knees,
before she could lope to the highway.

I read the state finally built grassy overpasses
for wildlife to safely cross highways.
There’s one nearby; you’d have liked that, John.
Do you recall the young buck on Highway 40’s overpass?

He lay there, antlers fuzzed, leg broken, splayed—
and alert while an officer directed traffic
with vigor as if conducting Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
I made you pull the car over and gazed into the buck’s

big eyes, as if the trust in them would save him
from Animal Control’s death needle. Crying, I asked you
if they’d spare the deer, take him to refuge.

They’ll kill him, you said. It’s merciful.
And then, it was you, lying there,
splayed on the couch, your buck’s eyes
wet with that same defenseless hope.

Praise For The Book of John

Lindsey Royce has given us a beautifully observed book of love and remembrance, loss and endurance. You will be moved. You might even be changed. It is shining with life.

—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Fallen Angels

In her finely wrought and emotionally gripping collection The Book of John, Lindsey Royce asks where we carry the dead, and her answers through the deep questioning of these pitch-perfect poems at once broke my heart and healed it. The speaker asks her beloved through the veil, “Let me solve / the puzzle of where you are, bring you / back to me for one more night,” and the magic of this collection responds with a resounding yes. Compassionate, compelling, at turns incisive with righteous and understandable anger, and, ultimately, redeeming and filled to the core with love, Royce’s collection asks us to cherish what we may have unintentionally taken for granted. This book is vulnerable and honest and Royce’s poetic craft at its sharpest, wisest, and most empathetic. Read this book and be transformed.

—Jenn Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal and River Woman, River Demon

Lindsey Royce’s The Book of John is a full-throated argument with and indictment of the father god of Christian teachings. As cancer eats away and ultimately kills her husband John, Royce bravely expresses her fear and anger, interrogating the masculine constructs of the divine and its influence on the military and her veteran beloved. She trusts herself to embrace her critique along with her faith that the spirit world dwells somewhere, her thrill in her Marine’s sexiness, and his gourmet meat and potatoes cooking. God’s absence, God’s withholding of nurturance, and God’s failure to intervene for the dying who suffer and starve leads her to question “if a Godthing with mercy even exists.” Concurrent with this “smart misery” is erotic joy, connection, resilience, grace, humor, and delight. She takes up the mantle of priestess, feeder of souls, guiding us into the liminal space where the living and dead meet. This is poetry that touches and transports, which is what we expect from the art; the difference in The Book of John is the generously with which the poet nourishes our creativity, inspiring us to sing—renewed!—in our own voices. Lindsey Royce serves us our communion feast with her sublime poetry, inviting us, “Break bread with me then— / Make merry, drink my wine.”

—Aliki Barnstone, author of Dwelling and former Poet Laureate of Missouri (2016-2019)

Sample Poem from Play Me a Revolution

AN OFFERING TO WHAT’S NEXT

I want to walk naked into the fields,
skin sequined as hummingbirds
that sip from purple lilacs, vibrant
as fragrant air.

I’d walk in sunshine glossing
my understanding
of the power to birth and kill,
both the genesis of blessings.

I’d watch tanagers’ wings
beat with furious grace,
embrace aspens,
breasts against bark, singing,

Death is immodest—
Give up shyness in love—
Be light as cottonwood seeds
drifting into whatever’s next,
into all that sustains, even me.

Praise For Play Me a Revolution

Play Me a Revolution is a collection that gives an entirely new meaning to the term “poetic justice.” This book examines the essential truths of living in our world today. Lindsey Royce is not afraid to take a deeper look at issues of war, race, human suffering, immigration, and gun violence. The poet examines these difficult issues with grace and eloquence. This collection takes the reader to the sensual sea, a bus ride, the Tao of wheat and the strawberry moon solstice. As Wendell Berry states, “there are no unsacred places, there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” This poet takes the reader to the sacred places, and beyond. Even while delving into the desecrated places, the poems here let us know there is “heartache in one hand, in the other, hope.” One will return to these pages as a spiritual salve. We will kneel to what makes us human and “the luck of each cosmic note that holds us.”

 —Connie Post, Poet Laureate Emerita of Livermore, CA (2005–2009), and author of Floodwater, winner of the 2014 Lyrebird Award