Window That Can Neither Open Nor Close

Lauren Russell is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close; Descent, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and What’s Hanging on the Hush. Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and residencies from Millay Arts, Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the New York Times Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and lives in Baltimore with her cats, Cat Jeoffry and Lady Day.

Praise for A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close“Russell’s hybrid collection is powerhouse poetry, a lighthouse calling us out of the personal and systemic haze that surrounds a life with disabilities, without denying the resilience required every moment just to paddle back to shore. Window is lonely, wise, and necessary reading. We needed this collection decades ago, not only as a clear lens into neurodivergence, but as a study in human empathy for others and ourselves.”—Erin Vachon, The Rumpus“I am in awe of Lauren Russell’s ambitious, feline capacity to make elegant, vast leaps between lyric poems, personal narrative, essay, vivid collages, and inventive concrete verse in this important book. The velveteen, sensuous sonority of her poems and the mineral edge of her pristine prose teach us about longing and erotic fantasy, life-sustaining trans-species relationships, and the ways our great responsibility to each other moves through the neuroatypical bodymind. Russell’s lucid rendering of her experience of autism spectrum disorder and OCD illuminates a private, captivating biography of eros, to imagine a subject glowing with wit, unflinching intelligence, self-reflexive humor. ‘How can / Black Lives Matter / and not your own?’ She asks, offering this book as an insistent answer: it does, it does, it does. This is as much a book of astonishing, vulnerable confession as it is a deft refutation of difficult medical and social histories that have misrecognized her. It returned me to life as a more devoted, curious student, listening at the window that will neither open nor close.”—Divya Victor, author of Curb"A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close is a book that undoes standardization and sanitizing language through stimming’s poetic repetition, generating ‘eccentrically whorling’ difference. Not open and not closed, too large to fit the frame and too jagged around the edges, this book captures the incompatibility and queer sensibility that accompanies a diagnosis. If identity is narrative, Lauren Russell rewrites the narrative of her own identity by reconfiguring neurotypical language patterns, and offering a book I wish I had read when I was a young neurodivergent writer, finding my way past misperceptions in a world where I did not quite fit, over and over.”—Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, author of before island is volcano“It is when you step into the universe of Lauren Russell’s mind that you realize the inadequacy of the material world. Russell’s bravery and keen instincts are revealed by her innovative approach to the page. Where you find lyric, you find shapes. Where you find shapes, you find images. I’m convinced that there is nothing her poems can’t do.”—Camonghne Felix, author of Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

• What the Poet HasFrom the HornsA Window That Can Neither Open nor CloseBetween a Dragonfly & an Osprey: Poetry as a Twelve-Sided Die, or Love Is a Game of ChanceRequiem for Elementary Language Acquisition[Deliberation #3]Are We Not Obsidian?[Deliberation #1]Variants: A Box of Poems[Deliberation #2]The Doubting DiseaseNotes from a City Where No One Else LivesExpositionNow That I Am Closer to Thirty-Nine than Thirty-Eight, I Have Located a Psychological Evaluation from the Summer I Turned FifteenPop QuizHidden CurriculumThe Cat Has the KeysNo One Knows ItNotesAcknowledgments