Twenty-One After Days
by Lisa Lubasch

(From the Winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award, 2000)

In the beautifully realized pieces of Twenty-One After Days, her fourth collection, Lisa Lubasch explores the fine liminal spaces that exist between the world we know and that which we imagine. Processual and canny, these pieces add considerably to an already accomplished body of work. From the operatic personae of How Many More of Them Are You? to the mournful broken lyrics of Vicinities to the sonorous profusion of To Tell the Lamp, Lubasch has maintained a compelling interest in the phenomenology of language. What is this world that we name it? she asks. And by naming it how do we alter its character? Twenty-One After Days is a necessary work.

--Katy Lederer

For anyone who has wondered how a rhizomatic book would operate, Twenty-One After Days gives us the particles of thought in language; the individual heart, dotted with holes indiscernible from its arterial and emotional tributaries; or the rips in the weave of a citizenry. At any moment, light might flicker, hieroglyphs dissolve into mist or snow or equations, and the landscape shake until the shards of its minerals, faculties, species scatter our own plans and nerves in a field of ever-shifting relations and valences. This is a shimmering book!

--Susan Wheeler

Lisa Lubasch's rich extended poem, Twenty-One After Days, snarls and snags the comfortable fabric we perceive as knowledge. Her ingenious knitting of language - a "luminous scatter" - skillfully works a continuous syntactic suspension: tugged between entry and obstacle, "lingering - on the brink of a conjecture - what is imminent is the chasing." The threadbare schemes by which we make meaning and narrative are exposed here; certainty is revealed as sorrowfully impossible. Yet we are persuaded with the poet that "patience may bloom backward into knowledge." The empathetic intelligence from which this poetry emerges offers consolation, a deft cupping of "the form's suggestion."

--Elizabeth Robinson