Let Go With The Lights On

Winner of the 2022 Jack McCarthy Book Prize

"Stick a finger in // the wound of truth"—Lexi Pelle's dazzling debut Let Go With The Lights On challenges us to the game of Truth and Dare. With humor, lyrical precision, and cinematic clarity, Pelle navigates the metamorphosis of girlhood, disillusionment with Catholicism, and the needs we hunger for without wanting. "Consciousness is a planet of mirrors," and these poems look at looking—what we allow ourselves to see, what we look away from—and how seeing into the pains of beauty, shame, desire, and love can be a revelation that awakens an inner reckoning toward joy.

—Tara Skurtu, author of The Amoeba Game

Lexi Pelle's wild ride of a debut, Let Go With The Lights On, is an intense, funny, beautifully crafted meditation on desire, belonging, the drama of femininity and the wisdom to know that "regret is where God isn't." The poems show us the perils of a girlhood but also the growth where, like "the hooked/fish's last dance against a thrash of air, we/are trying to move toward freedom." This book moves me.

—Susan Browne, author of Just Living

Lexi Pelle's debut, Let Go With The Lights On, chronicles a wise-cracking ex-Catholic girl's rollercoaster life while troubling the notions of self, art, religion, and beauty. Through the lens of pop culture, these candid narratives reimagine beauty standards and grapple with the awkwardness of girlhood, struggles with body image and recovery, and questions of faith. In this intimate journey, with a fearless and unreserved voice, Pelle constructs a vivid frame-by-frame exploration of the profound ways in which desire molds the contours of our lives. These introspective poems illuminate the complexities of love, our human beliefs and desires.