Forthcoming in 2025 from UnCollected Press
Enough
In a collection of sixty poems, Enough records the journey of waking up from hidden abuse after a two-decade marriage and the subsequent path towards healing: “part novel, part memoir, and part exposé…a voice for both the personal and societal liberation of women” (Lundy Bancroft, author of Why Does He Do That?). The terrible paradox: the closer we are, the bigger the blind spots. This book addresses “the many things that we just don’t know until we do” (Dr. Christiane Northrup).
Enough is a soul-piercing collection, resembling shattered glass that is both jagged and painful, and yet sparkles with reflective beauty. Any survivor of relational poison will recognize their own image within Harris’ work. The author has taken the complex and disorienting swirl of hidden abuse and has managed to strip it down to its purest form for the reader. Enough illustrates the journey from violent chaos to the confident stillness that comes only through freedom and healing.
— Shannon Thomas, international bestselling author of Healing from Hidden Abuse
Enough is a stunning and beautifully written book of poetry. The author has been to hell and back and has made a work of art and beauty out of it. She tells the truth without any blame; instead, she brings a spotlight on the many things that we just don’t know until we do, and true repentance and rebirth shines through it all. Few are willing to do the kind of soul excavation that Harris does here.
— Christiane Northrup, M.D., multiple New York Times best-selling author and leading authority in the field of women’s health
and wellness
Enough is haunting, unflinchingly honest, raw, introspective, and gorgeous as it traverses both the physical and emotional worlds. Harris is a master at calling attention to the paradoxes of life: strength amidst hardship and beauty shadowed by danger. This collection is a gift that offers, through the prism and power of distilled language, a rare view inside what it is for a woman to make her way to inner freedom.
— Ann Randolph, award-winning writer & performer of the one-woman show Inappropriate In All The Right Ways
Enough was a poetry revelation for me. In powerfully evocative lyrical style, Lyall Harris has created a work that is part novel, part memoir, and part exposé, all embodied in poems that frequently left me breathless. Harris has changed my understanding of what poetry can be. She is a voice for both the personal and societal liberation of women, but without ever saying so; instead, her writing brings the reader inside of women’s senses. You won’t need anything explained to you because you’ll be seeing, hearing, and tasting it all yourself. In simplest terms, this book mesmerized me.
— Lundy Bancroft, author of Why Does He Do That? and The Joyous Recovery
Forthcoming in 2026 from Black Spring Press Group
Barrier Island
Barrier Island explores the psychology of a mother experiencing a breakdown of Self. What can she can claim as hers: her body and her children? Her children as her body? An exploration of language itself, including its arbitrary nature and inherent limitations, underpins her struggle. Running parallel is the geological erosion of the barrier islands (the “Outer Banks”) off the coast of North Carolina: “how extraordinary, how precarious it is” says Soma Mei Sheng Frazier, author of Salve.
In Barrier Island, a factual Q&A is intercut with a mother’s vivid and painful inner thoughts, and word play is intercut with unsettling erasures. As the undercurrents of tension accumulate, Lyall Harris stretches the vessel of language to accommodate the humanizing and the horrifying. This is a mesmerizing exploration of motherhood and dread.
— Helen Phillips, author of The Need
There can be “no tolerable words” for a mind cracked into shards, and each shard “flitting untamable like contagion” under oceanic pressure like “a bathtub full of water and drowning” —so why do I experience this book of self-erasure as a thing of pure Beauty? That is my question.
— Alicia Ostriker, author of The Volcano and After
In Barrier Island, we find a bathtub “full of water and drowning” and a woman also suffocated by submersion. We find the fragile bodies of birds, a flightless wing erected in memoriam and the Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge—and to sit at a wobbly café table reading this book is like flying, like breathing: a mundane miracle taken for granted between momentary recollections of how extraordinary, how precarious it is. For where else will we find words hidden in hollow piping? Where else, identical antitheses (object/object) and the warm, wet guilt that’s run down every mother’s cheek? What a gift of a tragedy Lyall Harris has given us.
— Soma Mei Sheng Frazier, author of Salve
Other Selected Poetry:
“He Sends Me a Forest” in Poetry Fest 2025
“Passage” in Voice-Overs, a poetry broadside project of Virginia Humanities 2021
“Collateral Damage” in The Dewdrop 2020
“One-wingèd” in The Raw Art Review 2020
“November” in The Minnesota Review 2019
Selected Creative Non-fiction:
Behind Vasari’s Printed Word: A Tale of “Coincidence” and Discovery in the Montréal Review 2011