Jumping From Cloud to Cloud

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay: Insights and Prompts from Contemporary Writers and Teachers

edited by Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh

Rose Metal Press, 2026

reviewed by Seana Graham

Although I have read and reviewed a fair number of Rose Metal Press titles in recent years, I hadn’t looked at any of their popular series of field guides to writing until now. And I wasn’t aware of this emerging (though deeply rooted) form of the essay. There is controversy about what a lyric essay is, and it’s not even completely decided among those who have delved quite deeply into the form according to the editors, but I like the consensus they come to in the introduction that the lyric essay is an essay in form, but must be lyric in function, “meaning that it pays attention to patterning in language…In other words, there must be the presence of a lyre.”

Each section of the book is divided into three parts. First, the author of the section talks in a technical and analytical way about what the lyric essay form is as they understand it. Then, just as you may start to wonder if you’ve really grasped what they’re saying, there is a lyric essay exercise they have created, which is deliberately welcoming and unintimidating. And finally each author closes with their own short lyric essay, or an excerpt from a longer one, which makes it all come together for the reader, or at least it did for me.

The lyric essay is a form that is open to everyone. But I was struck in this collection by how often the form opens a place for writers who in one way or another are marginalized. It makes sense that people who might feel that they don’t always fit in would be drawn to a form that doesn’t fit in neatly either. The first author in the collection, Sun Yung Shin, is an adoptee from South Korea, another is a woman who refers to herself as The Cyborg Jillian Weise because of her cyborg legs. The Diné writer Natanya Ann Pulley talks about the Diné language, commenting on its fundamental differences from English. And so on.

I took the title of this review from the end of Ching-In Chen’s article on the lyric essay, “Leaping to the Next Cloud”, which is their contribution to this volume. Ching-in Chen found an entry point to the lyric essay through the author Kimiko Hahn, who also has a section in the book and whom Chen credits with re-introducing the Japanese ziuhitsu, a type of poem that mixes disparate things up, the famous source of which being The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, which is a conglomeration of essays, lists, poems and so on. Chen, speaking of the ziuhatsu, says:

I was intrigued by the ziuhatsu’s messiness and commitment to nonlinear representation. Each line I wrote did not have to derive from what came before. Instead, the line could switchback—echoing a previous memory or leapfrogging ahead. The textural switches in subject matter or form (from traditional paragraph to list to email, for example) felt like working out a familial line of scattered thinking.

The first set of groupings are meant to bring the reader new to lyric essay into an understanding of the form. The next section is about ways lyric essayists use patterns of sound, such as repetition, as well as the importance of white space in between the blocks of words to create gaps or pauses in the essay. As we go on, we see the authors seeking to break some of the traditional boundaries, putting together words and image in interesting ways. I was struck, for example by the way different writers get around the gaps in family history, able to make an essay even out of the slimmest of facts, like chaun webster’s excerpt about his maternal grandfather, of whom, apart from the fact of his having been a Black railworker and porter, the barest of bare minimums is known.

The juxtapositioning of these essays itself has a cumulative effect. You begin to see how wide and perhaps endless the different ways of approaching a lyric essay truly are. In the words of Marco Wilkinson, who has one of the later groupings:

When we write, can we write without being hemmed in by the bounds of genre, but instead be ready for any opportunity that arises, being ingenious and improvisational in our engagement and not dissuaded by “experts”? When a trail of associations takes us far afield and to the (imaginary) limits of what we think of as “ours,” can we jump the fence and continue foraging beyond what we expected to find in our writing when we first sat down before the page?

My only regret in reading this very thought-provoking collection is that, in order to review it in any reasonable amount of time, I did not manage to try doing the lyric essay exercises myself (though I did read all of them). I intend to correct that, and I think that the authors of this brilliant field guide would very much hope that you give them a try. 

Seana Graham is the book review editor at Escape Into Life. She has also reviewed for the biography website Simply Charly. She attempts to keep up with her various blogs, including Confessions of Ignorance, where she tries to learn a little bit more about the many things she does not know. She has published stories in a variety of literary journals. The recent anthology Annihilation Radiation  from Storgy Press, includes one of them. Santa Cruz Noir, a title from Akashic Press, features a story of hers about the city in which she currently resides. 

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