Reviews
Vicinities
by Lisa Lubasch
"...Lubasch's touch with the shorter line is energetic and careful..."The Harboring Ends" suggest a deeper religious nature, while "The Question Stood Before her Like a Terrible Eye" is daringly spare and works the way the painter Cy Twombly's scrawls energize a canvas...."
--Publishers Weekly
"Vicinities speaks in a language of fits and starts tailored to chart the difficulties of the self's emergence and those of delineating the space that the self occupies between birth and death... Birth and death are likewise embraced in equal measure, and Lubasch's linguistic banner continually unfurls to begin while at the same time folding to end...The first poem, "Ground Sways," It is this technique of swallowing conclusions or "veering off," without sacrificing a lovely precision and lyricism, that enables Lubasch's poetry to extend in every direction, beyond (above, behind) both beginning and ending. While the language remains precise, the images blur like objects under light rain, creating an atmospheric landscape while echoing the experience of being, "stirring in a miasmic dawn."
"...The book is most successful in the sections "Once," "Against the Hours," "Near," and "In Mid-Air" in capturing this existential ambiguity and in leaving the reader with a lingering resonance that returns her to her own "First Memory of Impermanence," leaving her in the "lost moment of a dream, stirring."
-- Laura Sims, The Boston Review