Ring of Fire

Lisa Jarnot was born in Buffalo, New York in 1967. She is the author of several chapbooks as well as a full-length collection of poems, Some Other Kind of Mission, (Burning Deck Press, 1996). She currently lives in New York City and is completing a biography of the American poet Robert Duncan which will be published by the University of California Press in 2004.

The remarkable poems in Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire seem to come to us out of some profound, yet distant, sadness. Rising on wave after wave of near endless iteration, like a linguistic Mandelbrot set, they arrive in the long moment after loss as the signature and enactment of an initiation – the primal collision and redemptive force of breathing between the tensile structure of the poem and the frangible space of living.

• I. The Book of ProvidenceThe BridgeDictionaryTell Me PoemOdeBrooklyn AnchorageWhat In Fire Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love?Found TextAutobiographyStill LifeValley of the Shadow of the DogsThe New LifeThe Age of the VelocipedeII. Sea LyricsIII. Dumb Duke DeathDumb Duke DeathIV. HeliopolisSuddenly, Last SummerO Life Force of Supernalness of WorldYe White Antarctic BirdsPoem Beginning with a Line by Frank LimaO Razorback ClamsMoo Is Om BackwardsSong of the ChinchillaYou, ArmadilloOn the LemurAardvarkSong from the GreekLake of FireThe Song BetweenOldThe Eightfold PathRight ViewRight AspirationRight SpeechRight ActionRight EnergyRight MindRight LaborRight MeditationThe Specific Incendiaries of Springtime