<p>'Richard Lucyshyn&nbsp;sees and hears what others sometimes miss or are not in the mood to receive; his poems change all that; they invite us into a world of astonishing unity and regard, into states and ideas, visions and mysteries, into abundantly and carefully layered regions within that world; we&#39;re invited to understand, marvel, and come away with newly minted, newly awakened brain waves; Lucyshyn&#39;s gift to us always leaves us grateful, glad and freshly activated' - Dara Wier, <em>In the Still of the Night</em><br />
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'Richard Lucyshyn&rsquo;s debut collection is a gorgeously tender, challenging psalm for the reckoners and seekers among us desperate to make sense of our dissonant&nbsp;and broken world, to be better than we are and have been, &ldquo;to be again born, machined new&rdquo; &mdash; it&rsquo;s an epic song for the strange unnamable that manages to invent, page after page, a staggering &ldquo;new genus of ache.&rdquo; This collection is itself the machine that hopes, which is the machine we need more than ever right now. Ever incantatory, these poems are a choir, calling for and summoning grace at&nbsp;every turn.' - Allison Titus, <em>The True Book of Animal Homes</em><br />
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&ldquo;&#39;I made for you a new machine&hellip;&#39; immediately makes demands of you: &#39;say star and say sun // say halo &nbsp; &nbsp; frost and feather.&#39; And it immediately tells you things about yourself you might not want to hear: &#39;Your penance is shabby&hellip;You will always hold dissonance and it will always be weird.&#39; Lucyshyn earns this by being infinitely more self-critical: &#39;how many backs I tore / it was me what / 39&nbsp;lashed / what held the whip / was me / what turned away.&#39; Striking a seemingly impossible balance between what he calls &#39;a practiced stillness attended to&rdquo; and the &ldquo;ecstasy of text,&#39; Lucyshyn creates a space both critical and celebratory, frenetic and meditative, contemporary and mythic. And only because he has the integrity to &#39;wager memories we dare to hold&#39; are we left with&nbsp;&#39;the oily residue of hope.&#39;&rdquo; - Chris Tonelli, <em>Whatever Stasis</em></p><p><br />
<em>I made for you a new machine and all it does is hope</em>&nbsp;concerns itself with the language of prayer and the action of prayer. Many of the poems, the [psalms] in particular, are the product of&nbsp;holding some word or phrase or sound in mind and mouth until it somehow exhales and reveals what word or phrase or sound it leads to. It&rsquo;s something more or less or not at all like dusting off some map that has always been exactly as it needed to be, that has never not existed.</p>