HOW TO MONETIZE DESPAIR

Praise for HOW TO MONETIZE DESPAIR

In How To Monetize Despair, Lisa Motollo captures the intricate and sometimes random thoughts and feelings that arise when dealing with life’s most difficult chapters: trauma, grief, loss, and the mundane. This collection beautifully balances the vulnerabilities and agonies of grief with the dark humor and odd realizations that come with experiencing trauma. But it also muses on the anxieties a person can feel attending a party or during everyday activities like making a sandwich. ​Life is full of many experiences that we either don’t want to discuss or even know how to discuss, but How To Monetize Despair is a beautiful example of how to start and navigate those conversations.

—Indie Book Review

Lisa Mottolo’s How to Monetize Despair transforms devastation into clean-burning fuel, complicating and ultimately exploding the concept of self-help. These poems are dark, playful, and surreal, examining the threshold between life and death, juxtaposing flourishes of nature with vulnerabilities of the body and things we leave behind. In “Destroying a Flower” the speaker observes, “It’s funny, we see fleetingness as sad / as though it would be good if everything lasted forever, // giving us enough time to get sick of everything.” How to Monetize Despair is a stunning debut from a poet with remarkable range.

—Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy

Here is a poet sparring in the darkness--bloodied fists swinging through empty midnight air and somehow landing every punch in every poem.

—Dan Sicoli, Co-editor of Slipstream and author of Pagan Supper

​Mottolo writes for us the self-help book we most deserve: it doesn’t make us better than, but reveals who we are… “A ruby-throated hummingbird came up the window / and I missed it because I was reading a poem about God.” Even our effort to be good divorces us from the good. And yet—and yet these poems are so profoundly tender in their unsparing insights that the book reads not as an indictment, but a strange book of innocence.

—Dan Beachy-Quick, Poet, Writer, and Critic

About LISA MOTTOLO

Lisa Mottolo is a poet and essayist who splits time between Austin, Texas and Playa Flamingo, Costa Rica. She has attended writing programs at The University of California at Berkeley and Kenyon College, and is Assistant Editor at Atmosphere Press. Her work has appeared in Penn Review, DIAGRAM, and The Laurel Review, and How to Monetize Despair is her first book. A native of Schenectady, New York, she now lives with her husband, two children, one dog, one rabbit, and, of course, four birds.


Learn more at lisamottolo.com, or by watching an inchworm swing from a tree.