Negative Money

“Lillian-Yvonne Bertram once again reveals how they are light years embedded inside the lyric, a futurity grounded in a currency of creation, resistance, and voicing of multiplicity. In short, they are their own blockchain of language: ‘I have visions of honey / in my eyes.’ Negative Money exhibits a disruptive poetics that hacks hidden chambers of viewing, of how we connect and understand ourselves and others.” 

–Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man: Poems

“This book completely blew me away. It is brilliant, funny, wounded, intimate, strong, vulnerable, electric, and completely original. I want to hand this book to everyone I know and say: this is what poetry can do.” 

—Matthew Zapruder, author of Father’s Day and Story of a Poem

“Negative Money engages a spectrum of interrogation into the poetic form's intentional discourses to dismantle power. These beautifully crafted poems look at the way power relations are set up in whiteness, academia, and in gender, articulating how the body can be consumed, exploited, hurt, and adjudicated; they build an emphatic affective world that both cries out and governs its necessary reckoning.”

—Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence

“Lillian-Yvonne Bertram has written one stunner after another, experimenting with the page like a word alchemist. Their brilliant new collection reminds me of a poetic rumble between Terrance Hayes and Harryette Mullen. If you haven't read them yet, Negative Money is your opportunity to fix that, and, as Jimi Hendrix said, pick up on it.” 

—Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World