Poems deal with perception, politics, beauty, love, writing, and history

Before Our Eyes

Literature & Fiction

Joseph, Lawrence

Poetry

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

The first three books by the author of Into It
Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos brings together the poems from Lawrence Joseph's first three books of poetry: Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae, and Before Our Eyes. Now in one volume, the poems from these three books can be seen as the work of one of American poetry's most original and challenging poets.

Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Into It: Poems

Strikingly contemporary new work by an acclaimed poet Into It, Lawrence Joseph's fourth book of poems, is as bold a book as any in American poetry today-an attempt to give voice to the extremes of American reality in the time since, as Joseph puts it, "the game changed." Joseph's first three books dramatized the challenge of maintaining one's self in a world in the hold of dehumanizing forces. The new book finds him in a time and place where "the immense enlargement / of our perspectives is confronted / by a reduction of our powers of action"-where the word "wargame" is a verb and "the weight of violence / is unparalleled in the history / of the species." Along the New York waterfront, on a crowded street, at the site where the World Trade Center stood: Joseph enters into these places to capture the thoughts and images, the colors and feelings, and the language that give the present its pressured complexity. Few contemporary writers have been able to shape this material into poetry, but Joseph has done so masterfully-in poems that are daring, searching, and classically satisfying. Into It is a new work by a poet of great originality and scope.

A professor of law recounts his conversations about the legal profession with lawyers in downtown Manhattan, from a corporate attorney who denounces all lawyers as pathological to a woman judge who testifies to rage and lust on the bench

Lawyerland: What Lawyers Talk About When They Talk About Law

Legal Self-Help

A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems

A selection of poems from the celebrated poet and lawyer
Drawing from his first book, Shouting at No One, from 1983, and continuing through to his most recent, So Where Are We?, from 2017, A Certain Clarity provides a generous selection of Lawrence Joseph’s "poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness” (John Ashbery), each poem “an inspired, made thing by a poet-advocate who has honed a timely song within an urgent testimony that embraces the complex density of truth” (Yusef Komunyakaa). 
Joseph’s poems constitute one of the most essential and visionary bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. No other American poet covers the territory Joseph does. His ever-new interactions of thoughts, voices, and languages―influenced by his Lebanese and Syrian Catholic heritage, his professional life as a lawyer and legal scholar, and the economies of the world of working-class labor from which he comes―bear witness, on multilayered spatial and temporal planes, to the velocities of global and historical change, and to power structures embodied in endless wars, unleashed capital, racism, and ecological destruction, presenting an ongoing chronicle of what it means to write poetry in the turbulent times in which we live. But also integral to Joseph’s poetry is a sensual intimacy, passionately driven by an acute awareness of a deeper order in which beauty, love, and justice are indistinguishable. 
Meticulously formed, emotionally fierce, intellectually challenging, Joseph’s poems press back against the high-stakes pressures of our time with a moral and aesthetic intensity not easily forgotten.

“So where are we?” asks Lawrence Joseph in the title poem of his powerful and moving sixth book of poetry. Beginning where his acclaimed collection Into It left off, amid the worldwide violence unleashed by the World Trade Center terrorist attack, Joseph’s poems―global and historic in scope―boldly encounter the imaginative challenges of our time: issues of political economy, labor and capital, racism and war, and “the point at which / violence becomes ontology, / these endless ambitious experiments in destruction, / a species grief.” Against these realities, Joseph presents an intimate, sensuous language of beauty and love, “a separate / palette kept for each poem,” a constant shifting and fluid play of sound and tone. With incisive intensity, intelligence, emotional force, and fierce, uncompromising vision, Joseph speaks from deep within the truths of poetry’s common language. So Where Are We? is extraordinary new work from one of our most distinctive poets.

So Where Are We?: Poems

The rift between our public and private realms is where Joseph thrives . . . [His] socially aware poems . . . show a mind at work-at home with inconsistencies and wary of conclusions . . . These are idiosyncratic, off-kilter pieces, yet no less observant for being so. -Albert Mobilio, Voice Literary Supplement An ambitious, breakthrough collection . . . His juxtapositions and examinations of language are often dazzling, often beautiful . . . Joseph raises the right issues [and shows us] how to be morally instructed by the sensual world we see before our eyes. -Nancy Schoenberger, Verse The poems in Joseph's third collection undertake the challenge of presenting, if not resolving, the paradoxes of a modern world in which plenty coexists with poverty, peace with war, efficient technological communication with the lack of understanding between face-to-face individuals . . . The poems are products of a poet who truly believes that "By written I mean made, by made l mean felt." -Laurie Greer, Virginia Quarterly Review A beautiful book. The poems are so good they made me hurt down to the roots of my hair. This book is going to be a classic. Reading the poems, the way one sets up another-the total impact, each poem separately, the whole experience-is a challenge and an exquisite thrill. I'm going to tell everyone l know about it. -Thom Jones

Noonday Pr

In Lawyerland, Lawrence Joseph brings an unerring ear for dialogue, a cunning artistry, and a prosecutor's radar for loaded testimony to a series of rangy, irreverent conversations with downtown lawyers, making his book a uniquely fresh and insightful accomplishment.

Lawyerland: An Unguarded, Street-Level Look At Law & Lawyers Today

Legal Education

Strikingly contemporary new work by an acclaimed poet
Into It, Lawrence Joseph's fourth book of poems, is as bold a book as any in American poetry today-an attempt to give voice to the extremes of American reality in the time since, as Joseph puts it, "the game changed."
Joseph's first three books dramatized the challenge of maintaining one's self in a world in the hold of dehumanizing forces. The new book finds him in a time and place where "the immense enlargement / of our perspectives is confronted / by a reduction of our powers of action"-where the word "wargame" is a verb and "the weight of violence / is unparalleled in the history / of the species." Along the New York waterfront, on a crowded street, at the site where the World Trade Center stood: Joseph enters into these places to capture the thoughts and images, the colors and feelings, and the language that give the present its pressured complexity. Few contemporary writers have been able to shape this material into poetry, but Joseph has done so masterfully-in poems that are daring, searching, and classically satisfying. Into It is a new work by a poet of great originality and scope.

“So where are we?” asks Lawrence Joseph in the title poem of his powerful and moving sixth book of poetry.Beginning where his acclaimed collection Into It left off, amid the worldwide violence unleashed by the World Trade Center terrorist attack, Joseph’s poems―global and historic in scope―boldly encounter the imaginative challenges of our time: issues of political economy, labor and capital, racism and war, and “the point at which / violence becomes ontology, / these endless ambitious experiments in destruction, / a species grief.” Against these realities, Joseph presents an intimate, sensuous language of beauty and love, “a separate / palette kept for each poem,” a constant shifting and fluid play of sound and tone. With incisive intensity, intelligence, emotional force, and fierce, uncompromising vision, Joseph speaks from deep within the truths of poetry’s common language. So Where Are We? is extraordinary new work from one of our most distinctive poets.

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

Books by Joseph, Lawrence

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

Before Our Eyes

Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993

Into It: Poems

Lawyerland: What Lawyers Talk About When They Talk About Law

A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems

So Where Are We?: Poems

Before Our Eyes

Lawyerland: An Unguarded, Street-Level Look At Law & Lawyers Today

Into It: Poems

So Where Are We?: Poems