Avail
Coming in January 2026 from Paul Dry Books
Preorder here
Praise for Avail:
“Fans of Marianne Moore and Robyn Schiff will delight in Avail, which weaves together stories of the poet’s adolescent diagnosis of von Willebrand disease with her mother’s breast cancer battle, all while exploring the lives of other women in the arts: Maria Callas, Edith Wharton, and Rita Hayworth, to name just a few. These formally deft, often arch lyrics expand the possibilities of the ekphrastic poem, interrogating how our aesthetic representations of suffering and illness render the true realities of pain invisible. In art, do we avail ourselves to physical suffering, or cast a veil over it? In this stunning and assured first collection, O’Luanaigh shows us how poetry does both.”
—Paisley Rekdal, author of West: A Translation
“Refracted through the prisms of gender, history, and culture, the poems in Avail are as rhapsodic as they are fierce in their reckonings. With both “a screwball spring / in my step” and an eye on “the honest falsehood,” Erin O’Luanaigh razes and rebuilds ideas about women’s lives, taking on troublesome themes with wry formal panache. From the glamourous artifice of early Hollywood to the broken magnificence of opera, and while presenting accounts of a self moving from girlhood through womanhood, O’Luanaigh is a poet of tender intensity. Avail is an exquisite debut.”
—Rick Barot, author of Moving the Bones
“I want to call this book careful. Also reckless. Measured and wild, brainy and passionate, serious and sparkling with wit. Not only in themselves but in how they speak to and across each other, these lyrics—lined and in prose—weave their impossibly delicate, improbably strong veil, wielding art not only to ornament but also to illuminate experience. Never have I seen such a mature, fully-realized debut.”
—Katharine Coles, author of Time and Chance
“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
“Erin O’Luanaigh’s poems revel in classic Hollywood panache, paying brilliant homage to the femmes fatales in whose snowy VHS flicker the author came of age. Her lines zing and sizzle and smolder, revealing how the deepest love may be masked by the punchiest wit. This is not simply a book of cinephrastic marvels, though. Here, writing is also survival practice and spiritual inquiry. What music avails a woman who outlives a critical childhood illness and then nurses beloved others through their own travails? Recalling Keats’s ‘vale of Soul-making,’ O’Luanaigh’s close-up shots with mortality give her insight into the heart’s depths and the otherworldliness of creativity, the ‘curious strength/ of a talent larger than the self.’ Resurrected, glittering with life, her language effervescent as a flute of brut champagne, O’Luanaigh is a chanteuse lifting the veil of wonder.”
—V. Penelope Pelizzon, author of A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye
“Reading and rereading Erin O’Luanaigh’s poems—the liveliest, most happening, most electric I’ve encountered in ages—is like listening to a wiser, jazzier, more versatile incarnation of Don Marquis’s Mehitabel the Cat recounting her adventures in this and a dozen past lives. Don’t let that lead you to believe that O’Luanaigh is ‘toujours gai.’ She is a poet of rich moods, infinite notes. Her French motto is rather ‘C’est la vie’—that’s life, in all its irreducible splendor. She is splendid.”
—Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems