<p>The first full-length collection from Cisewski showcases the best work from this Minneapolis-based poet who has graced the pages of literary journals across the country for the past decade. These poems, full of charm and wit, demonstrate an airy playfulness even as they confront isolation and loss. We were lucky enough to lure her from the bright lights of more prominent poetry contests and prizes, and it is with great enthusiasm that we present her work to you.</p>

Upon Arrival

Literature & Fiction

Cisewski, Paula

Poetry

Black Ocean

Paula Cisewski guides us through a landscape that resonates with the fugitive and far-gone, the ghosts of what Whitman calls our “go-befores.” A brother vanishes, and gives rise to a second city of the mind, in which “the dead and the missing” remain citizens, in which Keats’s negative capability is the sheriff in town. Cisewski constructs a swaggering, tender, Carneyesque Fargo of the mind (“Do we love Heaven more than God?”), a place that relentlessly arrests and releases our loved ones. This is a book of poems that fares forever forward, quixotic, in the fullest sense of the word: picaresque, curious, errant, and hilarious. In a midwestern odyssey at once metaphysical and emphatically real, Cisewski confronts (as Nancy Cunard once wrote) “every windmill in a landscape of windmills.”

Ghost Fargo

Nightboat Books

<p>Poetry. "The poems in Paula Cisewski's THE THREATENED EVERYTHING take on a teetering, siren-infused world in which 'bullets rip through every modern poem, ' and the speaker, like the rest of us, is 'always and forever / on a stairway to a stairway to, ' stuck between floors and phrases like an infinitely skipping record. This book is both urban and animal. It inhabits the political realm and a panicked interiority, the elegiac ('This elegy / is for who one man / in a repeating // mirror of men might have been / before violence') and a newlywed bliss that borders on the hysterical ('happy / as a warehouse stuffed with // white umbrellas popped open!'). I am delighted by Cisewski's formal virtuosity and her feverish humor, and I'm scared to death--as one should be--by the accuracy of her apocalypse. 'We gravel-knee our motherland, ' she writes. 'We are patriots, Sisters and Brothers, and our country's flag is a gaping beak.' This book's arrival is imperative, urgent. It burns."--Diane Seuss</p>

The Threatened Everything

Burnside Review Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cisewski, Paula. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cisewski, Paula

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cisewski, Paula. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Upon Arrival

Ghost Fargo

The Threatened Everything