2001
ISBN 1-880713-27-6
$14.00

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Vicinities
by Lisa Lubasch

In Vicinities, her follow-up to How Many More of Them Are You? (Avec Books 1999, winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award), Lisa Lubasch illuminates a myriad of landscapes and narratives. In some poems, she magnifies and elevates subjects ranging from the swooping flight of a bird to the approach of a werewolf to a fallen angel's climb "back into unlife" with winning precision. In other poems, she plumbs the ever-changing knowledge "I" has of "you" with far-reaching intelligence and foresight. Throughout, her personal voice grounds cascading turns of phrase, flights of imagination, and philosophically informed dramatic outbursts. Redolent with the timeless excitement of true intellectual discovery, this book gives us a spiritual education in the guise of a linguistic feast.

Lisa Lubasch's writing is animated by an intense longing, not a longing for wholeness or the self, not even necessarily for coherence, which she knows to be an insidious palliative. No, Lubasch's longing is deeper than any balm the world's surfaces can provide. It's unanswerable, immense, and unrelenting; and ultimately one has to think it is spiritual. It both propels and pulls her and us (the willing readers) into those flickering spaces where erotic thinking and abject being are one. This is poetry of sublime utterances, of registering the vanishing edges of an inchoate thought or feeling. As for precedents, one might think Holderlin and Artaud, Sappho and Joyce Mansour. But let me be clear: In the age of originality there is no one writing like Lisa Lubasch.

--John Yau

This poetry--Lisa Lubasch's Vicinities--gives pleasure. It searches out utopias in each consciousness, yours or mine, which you or I are free to enter and to leave as we will--because pleasure is our guide. There is rain in utopia. But, unburdened by meaningless claims, rain and death are without terror, as they should be without terror when they are not disclosures of evil. A realism of good outcomes, expressed in forms not burdened with obligations irrelevant to the purpose, this book is light-filled and confident of its truth. It is as the poet says it is, "The other life that wanted to be read."

--Allen Grossman

After the bravura of How Many More of Them Are You?, this volume is quieter, more intimate in exploring how to look both inward and outward, how to move in space, in time, in language. A subtle, hesitant rhythm probes the fissures in the seemingly solid--the fissures allow thought to enter, and love: "All through the broken lines,/you went to my heart..."

--Rosmarie Waldrop