Live Wire

In her second poetry collection, Live Wire, Amy Laessle-Morgan traces the circuitry of desire long after grief has finished rearranging the interior body. These poems move from Midwest ghost towns to motel rooms, from drive-in screens to collapsing department stores-landscapes where memory is a current humming just beneath the surface and nothing stays buried for long.

From the demolition of Detroit's Hudson Building to invasive species turning Lake Michigan tropic, from Buddy Holly frames to Renaissance decay, Laessle-Morgan examines systems-emotional, ecological, relational-that cling to themselves long after failure becomes doctrine. The world feels perpetually on the brink of apocalyptic undoing and still: the body wants what it wants.

Laessle-Morgan writes from the charged space between longing and collapse, where craving is chemical and survival leaves scorch marks. Tender and unsparing, cinematic and mythic, Live Wire asks what it means to remain open when instinct says self-destruct. What it costs to keep the match. What survives the blast radius.

For readers drawn to lyrical intensity, cultural memory, erotic intelligence, and the beautiful wreckage of being alive.