Plan B Press recently announced the publication of Palm Up, Fingers Curled, a chapbook of poems by Poetry Society of Tennessee member Abby N. Lewis. 

About Palm Up, Fingers Curled

Palm Up, Fingers Curled explores the tenuous–and dangerous–transition from innocent young girl to sexualized teenager. Many of the poems discuss the horrors women have been subjected to at the hands of men and the fates they have suffered. The title poem, “Palm Up, Fingers Curled,” which the cover is based on, describes the young female narrator sitting down at a table with her father and grandfather on her grandfather’s back porch, unknowingly entering a conversation about the kidnapping of a young woman who was recently in the news. Another poem, the first in the collection, describes an event in which the narrator comes close to becoming a missing person herself, one of the invisible women who haunt billboards, their ghosts staring out of faded, wrinkled fliers.

The chapbook contains lighter poems as well, such as “The Flood,” which depicts three sisters enjoying a mild flood that only reaches to the edges of the lake houses in their neighborhood. It is a tame flood that does not represent a disaster but a Ponyo-style wedding of water and land. “0.6 inches” explores the responsibility in owning pets, and the ways in which owners must make critical, difficult decisions for the well-being of their domesticated friends.

Palm Up, Fingers Curled is available through Plan B. Contact Abby by email at lewisan1@etsu.edu, or visit her website at https://freeairforfish.com/.

About the Author

Abby N. Lewis is a poet from Dandridge, Tennessee. She earned dual master’s degrees from ETSU in 2021, one in English and one in Communication & Storytelling Studies. Reticent, her first full-length poetry collection, was published by Grateful Steps in 2016. Her first chapbook was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Timber, The Mockingbird, Red Mud Review, and Sanctuary, among others. Her very first publication was in Gallery, the literary journal of Walters State, and she is eternally grateful. Her book reviews can frequently be found on Chapter 16’s website, as well as in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Black Moon Magazine, and The Keeping Room through Minerva Rising Press. 

Of her first chapbook, Jesse Graves, East Tennessee State University’s Poet in Residence, whose awards include 2015 James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a 2015 induction into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame, has said, “Abby N. Lewis is a young poet with an old soul, already aware of the losses of time, the pressures put upon us by growing older, and by the uncertainties of the future. She writes with rich imagery and real feeling for her subjects. . . . This Fluid Journey begins a quest, a poet’s true course, and readers will surely discover many treasures along the way.” Michael Amos Cody, her former mentor at East Tennessee State University and author of the novel Gabriel’s Songbook, has also praised her first chapbook: “The child in This Fluid Journey is as familiar as memory. She lives and plays, wanders and wonders, and readers remember days and nights and former lives lost but not wasted. But this young poet understands when to cling to and when to put away childish things, and when the latter is called for, she invests more mature settings and experiences with the same charm and mystery that nature holds for the child.”

About the Publisher

Plan B Press is a poetry publisher based in Alexandria, Virginia. Learn more.