A cold bubbling in my chest marks it: I will not die on this hill. I will wake tomorrow in my bed, embalmed by sweat. I laugh a chopped laugh, the laugh of someone who’d forgotten her mouth at the exact moment she recalls it. I choose the smallest star in the sky and make a toast in its honor. I will enter hell alone, swallowing a mouthful of spit.

Originally published by Garden-Door Press in 2021, we’re delighted to release a very special perfect-bound second edition of Wet Water Hill, with a new, hand-drawn cover by Ryan Skrabalak. Ships Fall 2026.

Wet Water Hill is currently being adapted into a film by screenwriters Scarlett Woodcook and Ballard Reynolds of Misguided Heart Productions, an independent film production company based in Boone, North Carolina. Follow along with the filmmaking process for Wet Water Hill on the Misguided Heart Productions Instagram page.

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Dennis Cooper named Wet Water Hill as one of his favorite books of poetry in 2021.

“Lily Duffy’s poetry is the rare electrifying kind, the kind that makes a jaw tremble. Vivid, gorgeous writing. With ‘varying degrees of submersion,’ Wet Water Hill delves into a childhood tide of inkblot faces and mysterious objects, offering readers a gripping story of a young woman’s meditations on desire—as told through various memoryscapes: a waterpark, a friend’s basement, a pine-pavilion. ‘A camera falls down a glowing green esophagus / Light scatters from my eye; I realize I’m the camera.’ Invoking Alice Notley’s In the Pines, Duffy is a fearless poet who fills the sound of water with immeasurable, ghostly light.”

– Paul Cunningham, review of Wet Water Hill on the Action Books blog

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Lily Duffy is the author of three poetry books: Wet Water Hill (Garden-Door Press, 2021), TACT (Vegetarian Alcoholic, 2021), and Sour Candy (Really Serious Literature, 2018). With Ray Levy, they co-edit the literary magazine DREGINALD, which has published the work of writers and multimedia artists from all over the world since 2013. Lily lives in Terre Haute, Indiana, where they work as a psychotherapist in private practice.

Books

WET WATER HILL by Lily Duffy (Second Edition Preorder)