Lisa Olstein – författare

“This poet brings a sparkling consciousness to the page and an exciting new voice to American poetry.”—Library Journal

“Most appealing is Olstein''s sensitive, quietly pained and earnest tone, w hich, more than the unusual subject, is the real star of this book.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

In Lisa Olstein’s daring new book, an unnamed lepidopterist—living in a hut on the edge of an unnamed village—is drawn ever deeper into the engrossing world of moths, light, and seeing. Structured as a naturalist’s notebook, the four-part sequence of prose poems create a layered pilgrimage into the consequences of intensive study, the trials of being an outsider, and the process of metamorphosis. In an interview, Olstein once said, “I don’t want poetry to limit itself to reflecting or recapitulating experience; I want it to be an experience.”

I have learned to peer at specimens through a small crack at the center of my fist. It’s a habit herders use for distance: vision is concentrated, the crude tunnel brings into focus whatever small expanse lies on the other side, something in the narrowing magnifies what remains. At the table, my hand tires of clenching, my left eye of closing, my right of its squint, but the effect: a blurred carpet of wing becomes a careful weave of eyelashes colored, curved, exquisitely laid . . .

Lisa Olstein is the author of the Hayden Carruth Award–winning volume Radio Crackling, Radio Gone. She earned her MFA from the University of Massachusetts and directs the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Winner of the Hayden Carruth Award Radio Crackling, Radio Gone is a debut collection of poetry that explores multiple logics of perception, association, and interpretation. Navigating the edges where things begin to disappear, the poems inhabit border zones of transformation where memory slides into imagination, wakefulness meets sleep, and things possessed become lost. 

What seemed a mystery wasin fact a choice. Insert bird for sorrow.What seemed a memory was in facta dividing line. Insert bird for wind.Insert wind for departure when everyoneis standing still. . .

Radio Crackling, Radio Gone was selected from the 1,200 submissions to the Hayden Carruth Award. By the time the anonymous manuscript was chosen as winner, the cover sheet was filled with readers' commentary: "stunning" and "lovely" and a bold "YES!"

Lisa Olstein''s third collection reverberates with twinned realities: wonder and terror, beauty and difficulty, celebration and lament. Through encounters with science, war, art, animals, and motherhood, Little Stranger explores the exigencies of close attention, the tenuousness of attachment, and the ever more rapidly shifting nature of knowledge. Intimate lyrics, elegies, and narratives speak in voices familiar yet strange.

Lisa Olstein''s debut collection of poetry, Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), won the Hayden Carruth Award, and her second volume, Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), was named a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" by Library Journal. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

“Olstein places the mystical next to the mundane. . . . She explodes theories of cause and effect and expands our notions of logic, symbolism, and the territory between dreams and waking experience.” —The Growler Poetry Review

In her fourth book—a gorgeous call-to-arms in the face of our current social and political conditions—Lisa Olstein employs her signature wit, wordplay, candor, and absurdity in poems that are her most personal—and political—to date. Like a brilliant dinner conversation that ranges from animated discussions of politics, philosophy, and religion to intimate considerations of motherhood, friendship, and eros, Olstein’s voice is immediately approachable yet uncomfortably at home in the American empire.

From “Essay Means to Try”:

Already during these two weeks of cryingI’ve purchased seven books each of whichfelt important to own and taken one hundredand forty vitamins and filled three prescriptions,none to help with the crying. I’ve waitedpatiently or impatiently in countless lines,Whistle, sometimes crying . . .Crying is how we enter the world, Whistle.We all come by sea, we all comeby storm, we all tear apart and are torn.

Lisa Olstein is the author of four books of poetry and earned an MFA at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She teaches at the Michener Center at the University of Texas and lives in Austin, Texas.

In Dream Apartment, Lisa Olstein builds a world of night-rabbits, bodiless shadows, and networks of wind where ode and elegy meet.

Devoted equally to the long arc and the sharp fragment, Lisa Olstein’s fifth collection maps the lucid ache at the center of night where “darkness stands in/for light,” certain heartbreaks never end, and love dovetails with losing. Immersed in ode as much as elegy, Dream Apartment employs a dynamic range of forms. Prayer-like spells cascade down the page with precision and abandon. Arrow-shot elegies explore the shock of suicide and find echoes in other kinds of grief—individual and communal, animal and ecological, sudden and creeping.

Agile narratives mirror the dazzling associative movement of unselfconscious thought, the dreaming mind, “bodiless memory.” Whether watching a stranger carry his dead dog out of a vet’s exam room or offering bouquets of peonies to night-foraging rabbits, Dream Apartment is propelled by the way poems, like dreams, unfold new dimensions of time and space. Casting their lines toward wish and repair, recognition and reckoning, these poems reveal how any meditation on loss is an exploration of love, promising that in “dreaming, something wakes.”