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1999 |
How Many More
Of Them Are You?
"A poet in her mid-20s, Lubasch writes with the intensity of a witness to the "birth of consciousness" in the classic late-19th-century sense. And, indeed, of the many echoes that resound in her debut volume, those of the most angst-ridden, defiant, uber-menschlich Europeans-Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Lautréamont, the ironist Laforgue-are the most apparent...Mostly apostrophic, with direct addresses to the reader, a lover or the powers that be, the poems approach being and consciousness with the irony-shucking fury of a new Promethean...Lubasch is at an interesting crossroads, one where the integrity of the fragment, and the continuities of lyric are simultaneously questioned...It is a fraught ride that Lubasch provides, and one looks forward to what her future, already foretold as a minefield of possibilities, holds.--Publishers Weekly In these audacious but subtle writings, Lisa Lubasch addresses the material worlds of love, language, and knowledge. In style, the writing has the aphoristic and fragmentary character of ‘notes,’ and indeed, many of the pages are labeled as such. The speculation that informs them is impassioned. But the fragmentation is an effect not of elusiveness or ephemerality but of skepticism—Cartesian and practical. This skepticism is not a response to some perceived inadequacy of language to address the world. Rather, it results from Lubasch’s awareness that it is precisely language’s notorious "inadequacy’ that makes it "perfect" for the unstable and incomplete world we experience. The world fits the gaps and ellipses of language exactly. The sensibility that perceives this is comic rather than ironic. It is, at the same time, precise, scientific, serious, and at points melancholy. How Many More of Them Are You is quizzical. It is riveted to paradox. It is philosophically sophisticated. It is a brilliant and thrilling book.--Lyn Hejinian Lisa Lubasch has composed a sophisticated and sonorous first book. Her poems (notes, fragments, assemblages) reach high and achieve a variety of tones and stances—theatrical, ironic, sublime, abject; the presence of Artaud and his kind provides impetus and standard. These are poems of elevated, operatic madness, but they are also quietly introspective. Beauty is their lodestar.--Wayne Koestenbaum In How Many More of Them Are You, Lisa Lubasch creates a poetic discourse in which the self surfaces and falls, briefly latching on through the very spaces of writing. This is new work on the old question: Who am I? Of what am I constructed? The ancient passion of the search, the deep mystery of the loss, the wreck and majesty of identity—this is the difficult terrain on which Lubasch casts her ear and eye. At once elegant and torn, the poetry weaves a forested and thicket-rich cosmology through which the self falls, "curiously bent over the tall grasses, I." --Gillian Conoley Lisa Lubasch has an astonishing agility with words—they become gymnastic, making contortions that are not only stunning but also very beautiful. As she searches out new shapes and a new pace for poetry to operate within, she’s also stretching outward, extending the territory of what can be thought, felt, and said—and changing the value of the fragment, too, making it something whole in itself, creating wholeness in midair. --Cole Swensen |
