Overview

In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time. As the poet goes about daily life—taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression—she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly high-stakes: “I often think about things so hard / I kill them.” And: “Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I’m erased?” In the context of such ruminations, the poet’s reflections on David Hockney’s seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight. Working to turn “mistakes”—misperceptions, errors in life and in art—into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers “a truth for every reader,” writes series editor Patricia Smith.

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9781682262702

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Reviews

""In True Mistakes, Lena Moses-Schmitt's fabulous debut, this superb poet and visual artist narrows the distance between faces and flowers, between death and children, thinking and living, making art and seeing the future. Moses-Schmitt teaches us to eye with suspicion the marks on any surface (whether page, painting, or pavement), and at the same time to practice making ourselves available to being moved. The poet holds these two impulses in expert, thrilling tension. I loved reading this book. It's left me all stirred up!"" --Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book and In the Rhododendrons ""Who are we to ourselves? Alone or in the world, in the past or in the future? Can we change, or stop changing? Who is reflected in 'the painting, which is actually the window'? True Mistakes is full of movement, and its poems are endlessly questing--that effort which suggests both a search and a question. They make living an act of asking."" --Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self

Author Information

Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer and artist. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Best New Poets, Narrative, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New York.

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