Lisa Russ Spaar
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of Satin Cash; Poems, Blue Venus: Poems, and Glass Town: Poems, for which she recieved a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. She is editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbua UP, 1999) and All That Might Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008). A collection of her essays about contemporary poetry was published by Drunken Boat Editions in 2013. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009/2010 and serves as poetry editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Reading List
The Ghosts of Monticello: A Recitatif by Carmen Gillespie
There has always been something operatic, even tragic, about the idealistic sweep and hypocrisy of the American experiment, an ongoing narrative-in-the making perhaps never more bombastic and perversely dramatic than in our current historical moment. Carmen Gillespie’s “recitatif” moves into …
Mantis Madrigal
Earth’s heir, pre-historic prophet in prayerful ambush position on the sea side of this beach-house door, intricate erector-set contraption of twigs camouflaged to match salt-bitten boards, you swivel your skeptical, bicycle-seat head my way, a cosmos horoscopal in eyes bulbous …
Promise Madrigal
Fetal fawn of an aborted hour albinic at the pool’s morning edge, was gone before I could return with spade, alarmed dog, my dread. What’s Time that it hitches a dropped thing into weeds’ misrule & gives to its miscarriage …
Bluebird Madrigal
Bell’s peal made visible, scrap of sky foreign as ice caves in a foreign country, or the self one seeks, fingering a postcard, its crenellated deeps, exotic stamps, hard -copy post, outmoded as paraffin or ink, odor of summer, or …
Secure the Shadow by Claudia Emerson LSU Press (2012)
Reviewed by Lisa Russ Spaar Claudia Emerson’s poems have always stalked liminal territories—abandoned houses, vestigial buildings reclaimed by wildness, bodies caught in birth and death throes, the crucibles of girlhood, middle and old-age, the half-lives of institutions, situations, places, and …
After the Meeting, a Red Fox
If ever more ravened, junked, numb-sconced I could not recall it, sopping in aftermath dusk’s blossom bock, ink-musk ale at rusted window screen, the annual carnival a neon embolism blurring the horizon’s black seam that from the brine of my …
Swift Among the Willows
“all are mere productions of the brain” J. Swift, “On Dreams” Midnight in the deanery, gangrenous flies, his mind having moved from honey pot to excrement, as when God invades the ear. Vertiginous, silver, trees of the past are …