Overview

Lisa Fishman's latest collection, One Big Time, is a stunning articulation of the author's ""journey-in-place"" in the environs around a one-room cabin in Northeastern Ontario over a period of fourteen days in quarantine. Here is the author at her most exacting and exploratory, in poems that hew with lyric precision to the immediate physical and geologic environment. At the same time, language is an alert, mobile life-form in active investigation of what one thinks one understands, and of where one thinks one is. While the poet quests daily for a passageway from one body of water into another, words live in other words (""the hemlock / is a he / today""), and acrostics are illuminations: s-w-i-m is ""sleek widening instant's magnet."" Surprised by joy, these biocentric poems offer a way of being in the world with wonder and rigorattentive enough to be lost, unknowing enough to be changed.

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Previous Praise MAD WORLD, MAD KINGS, MAD COMPOSITION Lisa Fishman’s Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition enacts an engaging statement of personal poetics offering up a kind of secular reliquary. Patrick James Dunagan, Colorado Review Poetry as interaction, as a way of being in the world, Fishman suggests, is also a way to sustain a life. The writing process, while ephemeral, nevertheless creates its own kind of cyclical order. Writing isn’t a way to extract truths. Rather, poetry as process creates a life through its ongoing interactions with the world. Emily Barton Altman, Annulet 24 PAGES AND OTHER POEMS This is a world in the midst of creation, an Ars Poetica of everything... Publishers Weekly Fishman's observations are informed by oneness with the ecosystem and depict an environment that is merged with that ecosystem, rather than personified within it... American Poets Readers of this latest from Fishman immediately sense how much she wants us to “JUST LOOK” at the world, how particular her own observational skills are (“yet try/ to posit as turning// the river the swimmer can// daylight”), and how, as we scrape against the world, “change it some/ is synonym for love.” Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal These poems touch the earth, smell a clump of soil in their hands. And, yes, a method—fecund, inclusive—is embodied here in the face of loss. Part of the pleasure of this book is feeling not only charm but depth. Taken as a whole, the poems speak a creative response, acknowledgment… Mary Cisper, OmniVerse Like Clare, Fishman can ramble; her friendly, loose-woven writing, with its lack of transitions, can feel like erasure. She also yearns “to hear past words of the self,” to bring other people’s voices into her poems—the people who wrote the books she read, and the human beings who share her rural Wisconsin life. Stephen Burt, Boston Review

Previous Praise MAD WORLD, MAD KINGS, MAD COMPOSITION Lisa Fishman’s Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition enacts an engaging statement of personal poetics offering up a kind of secular reliquary. Patrick James Dunagan, Colorado Review Poetry as interaction, as a way of being in the world, Fishman suggests, is also a way to sustain a life. The writing process, while ephemeral, nevertheless creates its own kind of cyclical order. Writing isn’t a way to extract truths. Rather, poetry as process creates a life through its ongoing interactions with the world. Emily Barton Altman, Annulet 24 PAGES AND OTHER POEMS This is a world in the midst of creation, an Ars Poetica of everything... Publishers Weekly Like Clare, Fishman can ramble; her friendly, loose-woven writing, with its lack of transitions, can feel like erasure. She also yearns “to hear past words of the self,” to bring other people’s voices into her poems—the people who wrote the books she read, and the human beings who share her rural Wisconsin life. Stephen Burt, Boston Review

Author Information

Lisa Fishman is the author of eight books of poetry, a short story collection, and several chapbooks. Her newest poetry book is One Big Time, out on Wave Books in spring, 2025. World Naked Bike Ride was published in Canada by Gaspereau Press in 2022 and was a finalist for the Canadian ReLit Award in short fiction. Other Wave poetry titles are Mad World, Mad Kings, MadComposition(2020) and 24 Pages and other poems(2015). Fishman is also the author of three books on Ahsahta Press:F L O W E R C A R T(2011);The Happiness Experiment(2007);and Dear, Read (2002); the latter was selected by Brenda Hillman as a finalist for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Fishman's other books are Current (Parlor Press, 2011) and The Deep Heart's Core is a Suitcase(New Issues Press, 1996). Fishman's work is anthologized inBest American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn, 2014, ed. Cole Swenson),The Ecopoetry Anthology(Trinity University Press, 2013),The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral(Ahsahta Press, 2012),Not For Mothers Only(Fence Books, 2007),American Poetry: The Next Generation(Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2000) and elsewhere. She is a dual US/Canadian with earlier roots in both the Detroit area and Montreal.

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