Lisa Russ Spaar
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008) and most recently Vanitas, Rough (Persea, December 2012). She is the editor of Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems and All that Mighty Heart: London Poems. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, and the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Blackbird, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and her commentaries appear regularly in national venues. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. "T'Parson's Anne" first appeared in Shenandoah 49/1.
Reading List
T’Parson’s Anne
–“Anne’s nothing, absolutely nothing.” C. Brontë, My Angria and the Angrians This morning she would have me tear the clothes from the bed we share, grasping “the snow, the snow, I cannot bear its weight,” and, sure, her fingers gripping …
From the Orison, River Stones
White thorn, crimson hips. Pleasures of the without. Pain of the without. Venus tucks low here, disappearing into the mountains’ stadia. What I can’t say, stepping into foreign tense of river, magnetic sluice, arctic tongs, far-off source without mercy or …
Receipt Medieval
Even in sleep, I can’t sleep but am prone, paralyzed, a plucked & boiled swan crooked in a gelatin of savory cherries, bays— Tak & undo hym & wash hym & do on a spite & unarme hym fayre— broth …