On the Lip of Night

On the Lip of Night invites readers into a poetic world where nothing is merely itself. Julie Esther Fisher's poems reveal the hidden kinships that bind people, memory, and the natural world, allowing the ordinary to quietly open into wonder.

A rib becomes a branch. A scarecrow keeps watch over love. Music gives voice to grief. Gardens, birds, forests, family stories, and the human body reveal unexpected relationships, each carrying the hidden life of another.

With extraordinary imaginative freedom and emotional precision, Fisher begins with the tangible world-a dress, a violin, a tree, a field-and quietly reveals it anew until the familiar becomes luminous. Rooted in childhood, sisterhood, inheritance, love, loss, and the natural world, these poems uncover the relationships that bind us to one another and to the living world, revealing beauty that has been waiting patiently within the ordinary all along.

At once intimate and expansive, playful and deeply moving, On the Lip of Night reveals the extraordinary kinships hidden within ordinary life, inviting us to see the world-and our place within it-with renewed wonder.