Lisa Fishman – författare

“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

Lisa Fishman's sixth book of poetry is centered on bodies and where they are in relation to each other--whether a body is of plant; of person; or of words, and whether a body is personal or civic; singular or collective; alive or dead. The contradictions of lyric unfold, in this most unconventional elegy, by means of perception so steady it can change. 24 Pages and other poems extends backward and forward, with the presence of many, such as John Clare and Friederike Mayrocker, helping along the way. As if a corridor could open or the EAR's two missing letters -- h e a r t -- e a r t h -- wherever an animal pops out of the water such as a hooded merganser appeared to do a somersault diving under, not like a mallard more like a child or a ball -- it didn't come up until it did Lisa Fishman is the author of six books of poetry, including 24 Pages and other poems, F L O W E R C A R T, Current, and The Happiness Experiment. The first Lorine Niedecker Poet-in-Residence in Fort Atkinson and Blackhawk Island, Fishman lives in Orfordville and Madison, Wisconsin. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago.

Lisa Fishman’s latest collection, One Big Time, is a stunning articulation of the author’s “journey-in-place” in the environs around a one-room cabin in Northeastern Ontario over a period of fourteen days in quarantine.Here is the author at her most exacting and exploratory, in poems that hew with lyric precision to the immediate physical and geologic environment. At the same time, language is an alert, mobile life-form in active investigation of what one thinks one understands, and of where one thinks one is. While the poet quests daily for a passageway from one body of water into another, words live in other words (“the hemlock / is a he / today”), and acrostics are illuminations: s-w-i-m is “sleek widening instant’s magnet.” Surprised by joy, these biocentric poems offer a way of being in the world with wonder and rigor––attentive enough to be lost, unknowing enough to be changed.

Lisa Fishman's sixth book of poetry is centered on bodies and where they are in relation to each other--whether a body is of plant; of person; or of words, and whether a body is personal or civic; singular or collective; alive or dead. The contradictions of lyric unfold, in this most unconventional elegy, by means of perception so steady it can change. 24 Pages and other poems extends backward and forward, with the presence of many, such as John Clare and Friederike Mayrocker, helping along the way. As if a corridor could open or the EAR's two missing letters -- h e a r t -- e a r t h -- wherever an animal pops out of the water such as a hooded merganser appeared to do a somersault diving under, not like a mallard more like a child or a ball -- it didn't come up until it did Lisa Fishman is the author of six books of poetry, including 24 Pages and other poems, F L O W E R C A R T, Current, and The Happiness Experiment. The first Lorine Niedecker Poet-in-Residence in Fort Atkinson and Blackhawk Island, Fishman lives in Orfordville and Madison, Wisconsin. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago.

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.