Avail

In Avail, Erin O'Luanaigh's breathtaking debut poetry collection, the young poet charts her life during and after its transformation by illness.

With an introduction by Ange Mlinko

"Avail shows us a world in which American popular culture mixes and meshes with European high culture, in which sestinas go wild, in which veils become vales, and in which lyric playfulness runs hard against chill form. This is an irrepressible debut collection, one to relish time after time."
—Kevin Hart, author of Wild Track: New and Selected Poems and Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood

Avail features a long prose-poem which titles the book and winds through sections of lineated, often formal poems. The prose-poem comprises a series of lyric meditations on the image of the veil—from religious and cultural veils, to veils imbedded in idiom and metaphor, to veiled women in art and classic films, to veils drawn and parted by illness and death—which slowly divulge the harrowing details of the poet’s blood disorder.

Throughout, allusions to classic film, literature, and art serve as the “veils” with which the poet attempts to obscure the self-estrangement and vulnerability her illness has induced—insecurities which follow her long after her recovery. In a poem about a break-up set during her career as a jazz singer and against the backdrop of a 1930s screwball comedy, she longs “to shake life by the martini (but stay self- / possessed), to star in the movie of myself / instead of playing second lead.” During a visit to Naples, Mt. Vesuvius becomes “a Crawford eyebrow / arched over the bay.” And in California, after a trip to the Getty Villa, she recalls Sontag’s “missive on allusion, that no part / of any work is new, that all is reproduction.” By the end of the collection, O'Luanaigh has fashioned from the sum of these various allusions her own poetic identity, unveiled in the poems themselves.