Paula J. Lambert
Terms of Venery, Revised
by Paula J. Lambert
ISBN: 978-1-962405-44-7
$16.00 ($4.63 US Shipping)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paula J. Lambert has published four previous full-length poetry collections including As If This Did Not Happen Every Day (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024). She has authored six chapbooks, including Sinkhole (Bottlecap Press 2025). Lambert, also a literary translator, was awarded the 2021 PEN America – L’Engle Rahman Prize for Mentorship. Her work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the 2023 winner of the Slippery Elm Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Amy Lowell Prize, was awarded a 2021 Editor’s Choice Award from Sheila-Na-Gig Online, and was the 2019 winner of the Heartland Broadside Series. Lambert owns Full/Crescent Press, a small publisher of poetry books and broadsides, through which she has founded and supported numerous public readings and festivals that support the intersection of poetry and science, including the Sun & Moon Festival now hosted by the Ohio Poetry Association. She lives in Columbus with her husband, Dr. Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist. More at www.paulajlambert.com.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Terms of Venery, the collective nouns used to denote a group of animals or birds, are reconsidered in this new collection of poems by Paula J. Lambert. Here, she confronts disasters of every kind—those ahead of us and those we might be forced to admit we’ve already been dealing with for decades. In Terms of Venery, Revised, the personal and the collective are ever intertwined, and ignoring any part of that “sacred singularity” can only do more damage. This, says Lambert, is the lesson we’re sent here to grasp.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
Paula J. Lambert’s poems in this arresting collection conjure new names for our broken inheritances: a perdition of priests, an extinction of birds, a miracle of matriarchs. The speaker moves through ecological collapse and the quiet devastations of ordinary life with a voice that is lyrical, sharp-edged, and deeply compassionate; they bear witness to holiness, violence, and the human ache. Reverent and revelatory, Terms of Venery, Revised quietly explores the fragile yet enduring connections between human and nonhuman worlds.
—Amy Newman, author of On This Day in Poetry History
Terms of Venery, Revised compels us to look at the world and really pay attention. From the humbling vastness of the universe, to the chaotic detritus of a tornado’s aftermath, to the tiny broken body of a dead juvenile robin in her driveway, Lambert’s gaze never flinches, even when looking away might be the easier choice. In the end, her poems teach us the importance of recognizing and naming those things that so often go unnamed then show us how to navigate, survive, and grow from the natural disasters that forever mark the landscape our lives.
—Kip Knott, author of The Other Side of Who I Am
Birds flit and soar and even, damaged via our carelessness, dance on one leg through Paula J. Lambert’s Terms of Venery, Revised. As the long poem “Stringfoot” puts it, “If we all understood what the birds are telling us, / what the birds are showing us, / we all might come to understand love at its finest.” These poems show us how “we can dive and dance through the gloaming.” How, in this world we should love and need to love better than we do, the kind of sustained attention that language well-used, as it is in these startling poems, provides can make room for the possibility that such love might make this world “look like a place you might want/to stay for a while.” And that in reaching “out to what the world is” we might become, metaphorically, “Paleolithic cave dwellers//leaving our mark, pretending/some part of this will last.” This new book is full of marvelous language and poetry filled with the stunningly perceptive, persuasive pretense of art.
—George Looney, author of The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible
As If This Did Not Happen Every Day
by Paula J. Lambert
ISBN: 978-1-962405-03-4
$16.00 (4.63 US Shipping)
ABOUT THE BOOK: As If This Did Not Happen Every Day moves forward from the mostly-bird-oriented poems Paula J. Lambert has been working on for years, focusing now on fish, whales, turtles, snakes, and so on. Birds are included, but the poet has turned to a wider array of species to tell a story largely of the feminine. Often victimized, in all kinds of ways—overwhelmed, hunted, and displaced—salvation, if it is to be had, is not in mimicking the patriarchal, searching for some kind of dominance. Grace lies within the larger, divine concept of a collective feminine. “I know you know what it feels like,” the speaker of one poem tells the reader. We live in a world overgrown, overpopulated, diseased, surreal, wild. Fish fall from the sky, birds crash into skyscrapers, and invasive species—in their own attempt to survive—take over every space they find themselves in. Even in our best attempts to help, things fall apart: “We who’ve lived long enough…multiply every problem we’ve inherited.” What’s left, asks the author, but to watch it happen?
ADVANCE PRAISE:
“How we love to know things,/…kill things,” writes the poet in this gritty and irreverent collection. The everyday for Lambert is what we acknowledge it to be but don’t wish to admit: a cycle of life and death, predators and prey, that we humans dominate. But the deeper wisdom of this book lies in the tender strength of its observation. Like the poems of Mary Oliver before her, Lambert’s praise the world even while implicating us in the great catastrophe of living.
—Kathy Fagan, author of Bad Hobby
In her collection As If This Did Not Happen Every Day, Paula J. Lambert displays her wide and intense observation and knowledge of nature and her equally strong empathy with many creatures – from birds, including often starlings, to whales. She has a strong ecological underpinning to her poems. They are thoughtful and strong. Through her, we enter the consciousness of many animals.
—Marge Piercy, author of On the Way Out, Turn Off the LIght and Made in Detroit
Paula J. Lambert’s poems are remarkable for their generosity of spirit and ability to find solace in a fractured world. She combines the extraordinary with the mundane—of course a whale’s heart is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and beats eight times a minute. In this book you will find whales and pythons and fish (no loaves) and of course birds, always birds—murmurations of starlings and sparrows that come on a mission. These poems resonate with empathy for the natural world as we struggle to find our place in it, and in the process, she shows us how to nourish one another.
—Cathryn Essinger, author of The Apricot and the Moon
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