Reviews
How Many
More Of Them Are You?
by Lisa Lubasch
From Publishers Weekly:
"Affronte tes maladies. Il faut les embracer." 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 and uber-menschlich Europeans--Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Lautréamont, the ironist Laforgue--are the most apparent. The book is broken into six sections of short verse-sentences, each of which is a poem augmented by lengthier "Notes" and "Leprosarium" (these last comprise perhaps 80% of the work). 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: "O vile and sophisticated burglars of the night. These are all my incantations!/ Of a sun that searches out its prey, then buries it, I say 'Deceptive sunlight! Implacable sidewalk! (Barren amour).' " The effective use of white space and asterisks between such pronouncements and quieter, more meditative verse put Lubasch at a productive crossroads, one where the integrity of the fragment and the continuities of lyric are simultaneously questioned. The result is a poetic identity shaken of its philosophical surety, and collapsed into a mundane, spiritually barren, visceral (read: erotic) existence, which counters all easy idealism ("the neat blue hills"). But the speaker, despite all the trepidation, seems desperate for real connection, and still believes it possible--"spur-winged, wagging, wagged/ into these words// poured out in rains, acred// urgings toward vergency." It's a fraught ride that Lubasch provides, and one looks forward to what her future, already foretold as a minefield of possibilities, holds.
From Rain Taxi Review of Books:
"...How Many more of Them Are You? maintains a high-strung, constant state of readiness, vigilantly attentive to a revelation held in prolonged suspense..."
From Boston Review:
"Surprisingly, Lisa Lubasch's book How Many More of Them Are You? maintains the interrogative/accusatory tension of the title throughout; Lubasch performs the daunting and ambitious feat of establishing an elliptic and elided narrative with one eye fixed upon the reader. The texts are pointed, entreating and incantatory, often playing an uneasy tennis with first and second person...Lubasch's insistently personal 'I' brandishes and questions, but never abandons, its identity or its vigilance..."