Lisa Samuels - Böcker

Anarchism is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end of 1925, when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson. Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria. Long out of print and now available for the first time in paperback, this is one of the most imaginative and daring works of literary theory ever written by a modernist figure. Lisa Samuels's edition sets the work in its historical context and elucidates its central intellectual difficulties. Her introduction and notes are a valuable aid to an understanding of Riding's work.

The poems in "Paradise for Everyone" transact embrained feeling and transform, via belief, possibilities of reference. Here, and here, the person becomes language, and language is an actor fully fleshed, whose words and bodies name and rearrange the poem's conditions. The book's sections are organized to suggest movement, not so much a narrative or progress as a cycling through of events, of compulsion, vision, desire, ruin, multiplicity. Each poem has an ongoing urge to self-difference as it dreams, travels, and exchanges attributes with locales and objects. That urge generates the intermingling of self and word in this particular paradise, language here on earth. Lisa Samuels teaches literature, poetic theory, and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition to poetry, she has published essays and edited work on modernist and contemporary writers, on intellectual property issues in the humanities, and on practices of literary criticism.

Tomorrowland is a book-length poem of bodily transit and colonial forgetting. Its names and events perpetually arrive in a new world, whose versions here combine promised lands and historical suicide. Eula moves among these real and imagined place-times with other symbolic names and unnamed figures, and Jack plays death. The primary formal note is the interrupted iambic.

Gender City is in our skins, in the law, in our names (like Trudi and Terra), in places like the Barbie Doll Museum, in events like falling on the sidewalk, being in prison in a city with buildings made of skin, rupturing murder in language (pure meaning's urge), considering language as tattoo in a city with mouths that manifest like a disgorgement in your gender, in the city that has no center as the tattoo of poetry (the skin under your dress) has no center.

This poetry unhinges the sensible cultural body - any given order of relations among meanings and encounters - and activates other oscillations of the sensible, which might chime with acts of love and political subjects resuturing what are given to be facts. These poems involve animals, nation-faith, technologies, history, grief, touching, inter-genres, legitimacy, violence, the wildness of moving forms and the beauty of thinking words.

'A moment in fast-forward and in fast-reverse, a moment suspended and dilating, a moment gathering into physical thought, thought open to the inrush of percepts time orchestrates as feeling and disperses into a fading mood: a moment's invention of the one who sees, the one who reads, that one a passenger of the moment, one among many, or in another's dream that passes through, passes along. This book is transporting. It thinks into every connective, with every connective tensed between forward movement and the desire to stay put and opening. Again, fast and slow, Lisa Samuels is a poet of time, and we are fortunate to have her time through this beautiful book.' - John Wilkinson

Livestream is digital capture thrown elsewhere, body fluids that charge being, and planetary liquid flows. Livestream's poetry entangles with those phenomena. The poems erupt, stagger, hold, and reflect as they evoke events and responses distributed through bodies and ethical borders. How language conjures us, and how we sense (with) it, is Livestream's constant ecology. The photographs are resonators, and witnesses.

The poems in The Invention of Culture mix prosodic rhythm with prose syntax and variant line shapes, as though the page were not only paper but also screen and musical score inscribed by a languaged body tapping out the news. And there is news here: the strained topicality of the poems is an index of imaginative vision meeting the world's insistence that it be experienced. These poems are stories with many names - parallax histories, social dreams, compound love songs and dirges - whose inhabitable spatial structures are like event horizons that mean to let you come back to the world.

Breach by Lisa Samuels performs a vital palilalia of lockdown. Starting with the dead, with Li Wenliang, who was the first to raise the Covid alarm, the book pitches and surges in deflections, hungers, and political feeling through pandemic-as-ordinary-life. The forced changes in relations we've all suffered derange the lines, chopped likethreats ofgrocerieshands on technomaps and wild-typehost societiesthere’s a maskbetween you andevery tangi-ble growthBreach is a song of lockdown: its tragedies, absurdities, non sequitur linguistic hilarities, and nightmarish lexical distortions, presented at a perfect moment for reflection, as we each continue adjust our bodies, lives and breaths...'The first work of poetry I have read that has helped me think-feel COVID; the way it is changing the relationship between inside and out, and the personal-political metaphysics of materialism, as body, as power, and as language. A vaccine against the solitude of screen heritage, confinement, and fear, Lisa Samuels’s Breach is also a meditation on the material of contagion. In terrifyingly precise helicoid strands of words hinging and unhinging from the order of grammar, Samuels unravels in poetic nucleotides the warp and weft of our different transnational pathogens knotting into monuments at the breach of biopolitcal capitalism, from the everyday of breath as windows, to the felt rend(er)ing of our data flows, our “crypt toes”.'– Lily Robert-Foley'Written in the middle of the pandemic that broke so many of us open, Lisa Samuels’s Breach pieces together the body that the Spinoza epigraph suggests “constitutes the formal being of the human mind.” Lines and words cohabit, fragment, and trail down the page, making new meanings and associations as this book considers relations among mind, body, and human, terms whose foundations have been unsettled by the pandemic, authoritarian brutality, and intense isolation of 2020-2021. In this polymorphous text pleasure and pain coexist, “ear to ear / composite / lustening,” and each touch is haunted by the breach it must cross to meet another. If we listen with more than our ears perhaps we can peer “underneath / your skein face / doctor, nurse” and develop “ideas of what’s / sheer.” Sheered open, we might make ourselves a little more transparent, a little less masked.'– Amaranth Borsuk--Lisa Samuels works with experimental writing, sound and visual art, and relational theory in transnational life. Her many books include Tomorrowland (2009), Anti M (2013), Symphony for Human Transport (2017), and The Long White Cloud of Unknowing (2019), and her theories of deformance, autography, and distributed centrality have wide circulation. In 2021, her novel Tender Girl (2015) will appear in Serbian translation with Partizanska Press. Breach is her first poetry book with Boiler House Press.