Lucy Biederman: Poet, Writer, and Author of The Walmart Book of the Dead

Lucy Biederman is an American poet, fiction writer, essayist, and scholar whose work explores repetition, consumer culture, mortality, enclosure, montage, and literary inheritance. She is the author of The Walmart Book of the Dead and several poetry chapbooks, including The Other World, As I Walked Into the Middle of the Night Squinting, and The Hardest Part Is Done.

Biederman belongs among contemporary poets and hybrid writers whose work moves freely among poetry, prose, fiction, essay, and scholarship. Her writing often turns familiar cultural language into a structure for repetition, estrangement, and moral attention.

The Walmart Book of the Dead

The Walmart Book of the Dead, published by Vine Leaves Press in 2017, uses the formal idea of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead to organize a contemporary sequence centered on Walmart, mortality, class, work, consumer culture, and the afterlife of ordinary lives.

The book treats the retail store as a social world dense with ritual, hierarchy, fantasy, fear, and identification. Its repeated spells and invocations allow everyday commercial language to acquire ceremonial and metaphysical weight.

Genre and experiment

Biederman has described the project as emerging from a space where poetry and prose remain close to one another. Long prose sections, recurring formal structures, narrative fragments, and lyric pressure make genre itself part of the book’s design.

That openness connects her work with experimental poetry and hybrid writing that use inherited literary forms as frameworks for contemporary social material.

The Other World

The Other World, published by Dancing Girl Press, belongs to Biederman’s poetry chapbook work. Across her shorter books, repetition, memory, enclosure, family, anxiety, and associative movement become recurring compositional pressures.

Airliner

Airliner repeats the word “airplane” until travel becomes enclosure. Seats, tickets, doors, magazines, breath, and bodily movement are absorbed into the same recurring noun, giving the poem a comic surface and a tightening sense of anxiety.

Repetition changes the scale of the object. The airplane becomes setting, rhythm, pressure, and almost a verbal container for the speaker’s attention.

That’s enough of that

That’s enough of that moves through travel, laundry, weather, music, streets, remembered gestures, and passing scenes. Its fragmentary movement creates continuity through association rather than through a single narrative line.

Memory arrives as a sequence of partial returns. Images keep their separateness while contributing to a wider atmosphere of attachment, movement, and recollection.

Celia Dropkin and literary inheritance

Biederman’s essay on Yiddish-language poet Celia Dropkin, published by the Poetry Foundation, extends her creative practice into literary homage and criticism. Handwriting, diagram, quotation, personal memory, and visual arrangement become part of the essay’s form.

Her scholarship more broadly examines how contemporary writers interpret literary predecessors. Creative and critical work therefore meet around a shared question: how can inherited language and forms remain active inside a new historical moment?

Education and scholarship

Biederman holds an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her scholarly work has focused on American literature and on the relationships contemporary writers build with earlier authors.