Description:
"The shape-shifting realms of longing are fitful setting for local genius. But here, in Lisa Fishman's beautiful first collection of poems, is where for the love of the world we find ourselves. As a reader, I could say I see in these poems a devotion approaching to love, if love ever stayed still enough to take a linguistic reading of. The poet sees much more, though. There's possibly no harder stance for the young poet to take up than one of love and longing. . ."
--William Olsen, from the foreword
Review Quotes: "This first collection . . . is informed by Stevens's colorism and his civilized, lush metaphysics. Fishman's concrete, specific images also bring to mind William Carlos Williams's dictum, 'No ideas but in things!' Well-crafted lines shake up points of view and the process of viewing: 'Various trees/ take place, take blossom; like nets that catch our ankles in silk holes.' Fishman's strongest phrases are rooted in an assiduous attention to particulars that give shape and weight to observations of the unconscious, her primary focus. . . . Fishman's poems are consistently powerful in their close hewing to the physical world, and this collection announces a strong, commanding presence with such lines as 'Who needs the tattered covenant this body is?/ The car glides like an egg through the centuries falling around it' and '...but I would say my lungs are bruise-colored rivers of trout/ cascading faster than Killyon Creek/ and with less reason.'"-- "Publishers Weekly"