Description: In sensual new poems, Lisa Russ Spaar explores the physical and spiritual desires of late-middle age, showcasing as she does so her magical capacity to entwine the colloquial and baroque, the explicit and the ethereal.
Brief description: Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of a novel, Paradise Close; six acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems; and The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, a collection of poetry history and criticism. She was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Spaar has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors and awards. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where for many years she directed the MFA program.
Review Quotes: Poet, essayist, and anthologist Spaar (Vanitas, Rough) draws upon the Greek term for "desire" or "appetite," in a collection that is palpable with hunger for the physical: "Simple to say: there is a gash, // then balm. Admit we love the abyss, / our mouths sipping it in one another." Yet Spaar's poems are not satisfied only by the carnal. "Can a word have soul? How move/ from one to the next without dying?" Spaar asks. And this is what she hungers for, to keep each word as vividly alive in each piece as she can...-- "Publishers Weekly"