The poems in Blade Work explore the relationship between humans and both the natural and built environments, questioning the violence we do to nature and its creatures, along with the industrial landscapes we traverse in our daily lives. Thinking through our relationship to nature, the poems also wonder how nature relates to us, questioning the power dynamics in this fraught connection.

"In the tradition of such poets as Laura Jensen, Jean Valentine, and Saskia Hamilton—yet utterly their own—Lily Brown’s poems spring from ordinary enough spaces—the natural world, domestic life and what goes on there—but as if these were the understory to a vast forest of waking dream, of the 'general and particular/rhymed to dream’s interior.' The poems are governed, I would add, by dream’s particular, elusive, strange logic, all the stranger for how persuasive and authoritative it is while refusing to be mapped or, indeed, explained. I trust these poems, as I trust their way of thinking—a way that, by the book’s end, feels like the only way of proceeding: not past mystery, but deeper, into it."
—Carl Phillips