Saint Dymphna’s Playbook by Hillary Leftwich
Saint Dymphna’s Playbook by Hillary Leftwich
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Saint Dymphna’s Playbook
by Hillary Leftwich
Publication Date: April 30, 2025
Trade Paper; 146 pages; 5-1/4" x 8"
ISBN 978-1-938753-51-0
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In lyrical prose that embodies the fragmented form, Saint Dymphna’s Playbook mixes with hybrid verse, poetry, and lyrical essay detailing a ferocious and unapologetic viewpoint of how a woman’s body is seen and governed in a world determined to control and dominate. Themes of suicide, sexual assault, and the male gaze—even in the professional world of being a private investigator, a child, a mother, a lover—each piece pulling from experiences hard to confront. In this playbook of survival, Leftwich allows the reader to bear witness, handing the reader a gift of vulnerability and what it means to be alive in a society where women vanish in more ways than one.
“In Saint Dymphna’s Playbook, Hillary Leftwich offers both a terrible testimony of endured violence and an invocation of absolution. With a variety of compelling experimental forms, readers confront the ways in which violence and sexual assault shape our understanding of the world and of ourselves. This book is ‘a small tree in a burnt clearing’—an incantation and an unflinching account of what breaks us and how we navigate survival when ‘vibrations of our past … can never be buried.’”
—Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms and Night Swim
“Hillary Leftwich’s relentless sentences vibrate with the alchemical aura of incantation. Saint Dymphna's Playbook is part spell book, part survivor testimonial, part cultural condemnation, part clinical investigation, part lineated essay, unflinching in tone and propulsive in tempo: this is a video diary set to alphabetical text or the reverse. Throughout her many experiments in form, Leftwich’s forensic attention never forgets the primacy of interiority and the body’s commitment to carry even the unbearable.”
—Chris Campanioni, author of Death of Art, Windows 85, and Drift Net
“Hillary Leftwich crafts passionate lines with precise musicality. There’s so much beauty here, washing over the brutally violent content until it drowns, blurry images at the bottom of a perfectly blue and dazzling poolscape. A cautionary note to readers frames Saint Dymphna’s Playbook, Leftwich’s brilliant and unyielding prose poetry collection. Yet this collection defies the language and logic of warnings. These are poems that instill awe instead of fear, joy instead of horror, love instead of loss. The warnings are the events of the poems, but the poems are events unto themselves: gorgeous line after gorgeous line, prayers, divinations, characters whose voices rise and thrive above the white noise of patriarchal violence. ‘Hey, summer storm. You’ll never know what it’s like to swallow an ocean and still be empty.’ This collection fills up and up, pregnant with talent, with the nerve and drive to tell and tell and tell: secrets, stories, truths. A stunning book.”
—Carol Guess, author of Infodemic and Sleep Tight Satellite
“A volume of poems. A diagram of loss and trauma. A book of prayers. A compendium of incantations. Hillary Leftwich’s Saint Dymphna’s Playbook is all of these things and more. Each word is carefully chosen to call close the spirits that might heal the worst wounds that humanity can inflict. A breathtaking, beautifully fragmented hybrid work like no other.”
—Alex DiFrancesco, author of Breaking the Curse and Transmutation: Stories
“Harrowing, lyrical, and deeply poignant, Hillary Leftwich’s previous book Aura was one of my favorite books of 2022. Saint Dymphna’s Playbook builds on some of the powerful memoir material contained within Aura, while simultaneously being an entirely new thing. Hybrid in origin, Saint Dymphna’s Playbook utilizes poetry, text and image, and short and long essays. ‘Good Girls’ recounts Leftwich’s work as a private investigator—which is both sad and tantalizingly interesting—and the book’s title essay draws out how who we once were deeply impacts not just who we are now, but also history as a whole. The culminating effect of Saint Dymphna’s Playbook is of an artist creating at the height of her powers. A must-read for anyone interested in memoir and the creative act.”
—Jeff Alessandrelli, director of Fonograf Editions, author of And Yet and Fur Not Light
“Like the unexpected beauty of a bruise blooming under skin, Hillary Leftwich's voice rises from blunt pain and fury, as evidence of both the trauma and healing of violence. St. Dymphna's Playbook is a cathartic scream, capturing the horror and power of life in a woman’s body. Society may wield the freedom to violate, ravage, and wound us without consequence, but Leftwich shows that we can transform violence into something achingly beautiful, witnessed, and shared.”
—Gogo Germaine, author of Glory Guitars: Memoir of a ’90s Teenage Punk Rock Grrrl
“Saint Dymphna’s Playbook by Hillary Leftwich demands of the mind and body a profound, visceral response—physical, emotional, and spiritual. From the moment I read the line ‘Me with my lamb mouth. Her with her wolf heart.’ I knew I was stepping into a deeply vulnerable, raw space. This is a place many women fiercely protect, often hidden behind walls built from shame, anger, guilt, and a sense of otherness due to our particular traumas, experiences, and creative ability, wanted or not dictated by our unique biology. These barriers speak to the shared weight of feminine experience and how our collective agency has been quietly stolen. Yet society urges us to remain silent, sweet, compliant—‘good girls’ as Leftwich so poignantly writes. In ‘The Woman Beautiful,’ she hauntingly reminds us: ‘We dream of erasing ourselves in mist and mud.’ Leftwich’s words slice through the epidermis, divide veins, and shatter bone, exposing the struggle and strength of being a woman in a world that often seeks to silence us. This book goes beyond written communication; it is an experience of birth, baptism, death, and resurrection.”
—Brenda S. Tolian, author of Bestial Mouths and Blood Mountain
