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“In this unflinching debut, Mammone has embarked on a profound rewriting of the confines and limitlessness of the othered body. Embodying a body that, at every turn, power and pain attempt to bind, Mammone refuses border: becomes ungovernable and boundless on these pages. Steeped in remarkable craft driven by disability poetics, lyric acuity, and voice-driven narrative, these poems are a precise guide through belonging, grief, and above all: a deep and withstanding love for disabled and discarded bodies. Through lyric of unyielding ache, the engine is always kinship – diagnosis sisters, the last bird of its kind, catching light off her prism – relentless hope is both sharpened and worn down by desire. This collection holds, equally, the sinking weight and unimaginable possibility of a love untouchable by outsiders. Mammone’s fresh and cutting voice is both tongue-in-cheek and tinged with an unkillable optimism. This book blooms in the space where gender and the body meet; it is a profoundly intimate look into one woman’s diagnoses and the vibrant world she sprung up around it, and it is required reading for anyone who has felt the unsayable ache of a body.”
—Desireé Dallagiacomo, author of Sink
“There are few debut collections I’ve waited for as hungrily Liv Mammone’s Fire in the Waiting Room and, believe me, it lives up to every expectation. Witty, wry, and lyrically stunning, these poems blend memoir, myth, history, surrealism, and polemic in surprising and exciting ways. Throughout, Mammone refuses to sing of the joy without the grief or rage, of desire without the distance from it, of survival without its cost.”
—torrin a greathouse, author of Deed and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound
“Liv Mammone is fierce. A one-woman riot. A tectonic shift. Here, her “crutches are fusing to hooves,” “the red rind” of her spine is exposed, and her knees become “a shaking, crooked shout.” Mammone’s defiant lexicon not only alters the modern poetic landscape, it reimagines how warriors render their stories. Where “a bruise” who was “just barely a girl” flaunts a “say it to my face gaze.” Where an “upside-down tiger lily…proud and crooked” eclipses us all, reveling in her “own right to be alive.” I want to live this loud—this punk rock.
—Jeanann Verlee, author of prey, Said the Manic to the Muse, and Racing Hummingbirds
Liv Mammone (she/her) is an editor and poet from Long Island. Her poetry has appeared with Button Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, The Medical Journal of Australia, and in many other places. As a performer, she was a 2017 member of the Union Square Slam national team and a finalist at the 2017 Capturing Fire Slam. A Brooklyn Poets Fellow and Zoeglossia fellow, she is currently an editor at Game Over Books. In 2022, hers was one of the top ten most read poems at Split This Rock’s poetry database, The Quarry.