Description: Spanning 16 years of notebooks, teaching notes, and improvisations, Lisa Fishman's Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition upends time itself in lyric, prose, and visual forms. Sharing Paul Klee's intuition that "the eye travels along the path cut out for it in the work," this deeply multifaceted book moves between observational directness and maddened speech, places and persons, humor and alarm. Tempted by Laura Riding's renunciation of poetry yet rich with life-forms of all kinds (vegetable, animal, processual), it is a work of immediate presence and continuous change, enacting an ever-renewing ecology of connection in peril.
Review Quotes:
Much like the sudden odor of rain or dry leaves rustling, these exquisite poems are not outside the common world. Rather, they are found entirely within it--in the sounds, smells, feel of a life, of each day's sun and its fading, of what we can know of one another. Lisa Fishman writes with an impeccable sense of cadence, of words as sounds too, of physical fact becoming thought and then recurring as poetry.
--Robert Creeley
Lisa Fishman is a writer who works--confidently, brilliantly--in close-up, often phrase to phrase, building texts that knock you over with their rhythms & insights even though it would be very difficult indeed to paraphrase what she's doing.
--Ron Silliman
This is a world in the midst of creation, an Ars Poetica of everything.
--Publishers Weekly