I made for you a new machine and all it does is hope

"Richard Lucyshyn sees and hears what others sometimes miss or are not in the mood to receive; his poems change all that; they invite us into a world of astonishing unity and regard, into states and ideas, visions and mysteries, into abundantly and carefully layered regions within that world; we're invited to understand, marvel, and come away with newly minted, newly awakened brain waves; Lucyshyn's gift to us always leaves us grateful, glad and freshly activated" - Dara Wier, In the Still of the Night

"Richard Lucyshyn's debut collection is a gorgeously tender, challenging psalm for the reckoners and seekers among us desperate to make sense of our dissonant and broken world, to be better than we are and have been, "to be again born, machined new" -- it's an epic song for the strange unnamable that manages to invent, page after page, a staggering "new genus of ache." This collection is itself the machine that hopes, which is the machine we need more than ever right now. Ever incantatory, these poems are a choir, calling for and summoning grace at every turn." - Allison Titus, The True Book of Animal Homes

"'I made for you a new machine...' immediately makes demands of you: 'say star and say sun // say halo frost and feather.' And it immediately tells you things about yourself you might not want to hear: 'Your penance is shabby... You will always hold dissonance and it will always be weird.' Lucyshyn earns this by being infinitely more self-critical: 'how many backs I tore / it was me what / 39 lashed / what held the whip / was me / what turned away.' Striking a seemingly impossible balance between what he calls 'a practiced stillness attended to" and the "ecstasy of text, ' Lucyshyn creates a space both critical and celebratory, frenetic and meditative, contemporary and mythic. And only because he has the integrity to 'wager memories we dare to hold' are we left with 'the oily residue of hope.'" - Chris Tonelli, Whatever Stasis


I made for you a new machine and all it does is hope concerns itself with the language of prayer and the action of prayer. Many of the poems, the [psalms] in particular, are the product of holding some word or phrase or sound in mind and mouth until it somehow exhales and reveals what word or phrase or sound it leads to. It's something more or less or not at all like dusting off some map that has always been exactly as it needed to be, that has never not existed.