Poetry. Many brilliant works of art are two-toned; consider the upbeat melody to Charles Mingus's Fables of Faubus, an otherwise bitter screed against segregation and racism. Or consider the chirpy sound of the Beatles' Ticket to Ride, a song about loss. Lissa Wolsak's stern jeremiad against contemporary two- facedness and cruel grasping after material well-being gets orchestrated in the joyful noise of a vocabulary unlike that of any other poet. The surface sound of delight mixes with under—and overtones of excoriation against what she calls 'The Eigenface' or 'mean face' of our time. Her message is bracingly pure, but the language is blessedly mongrel. "Lissa Wolsak's work is remarkably constant and changing, transcendent and quotidian. She burst onto the literary scene, creating in mid- life an entirely original poetry that brought together a practice that in Paul Celan's words, 'Came a word... / through the night, / wanted to glow, wanted to glow,' and Lorine Niedecker's injunction, 'To give heat' as being 'within / the control of / every human being.' Haunted with the visage of the Eigenface, glossed by Wolsak as 'the 'mean' face,' that is the 'face of all faces,' Wolsak in OF BEINGS ALONE interjects into her poetry the disappointment of our present time, compelled as it is by capitalism's bottom line and the 'mean' face it has acquired. Refusing to sentimentalize alienation or delineate dystopia, Wolsak creates a poetry of words that glow and create heat: 'some numbness of presence / an unutterable virtuosity / spectacularized our being.' At some point in Western culture, psychology, philosophy and religion became ineluctably divided. Wolsak draws them together in a writing relentlessly alert to its own moment. That work can only be read at the depths on which it insists, and by those who would engage this annealing. OF BEINGS ALONE and its Eigenface stares us down, leaving us no space, or all the space we would ever want."—Jeanne Heuving

Of Beings Alone: The Eigenface

Literature & Fiction

Wolsak, Lissa

Poetry

Tinfish Press

Lissa Wolsak, a poet who seemingly emerged fully-formed in the mid-1990s, now offers access to the realized body of her work in this collection. Neither easily classified nor directly traceable to a particular school or lineage, she stands instead within her own continuously evolving context-one as free of convention and fashion as it is independent of thought outside the work itself. The mirror would do well to reflect further, demands Jean Cocteau's Orphic radio voice, and Wolsak's poetry answers to this strange admonition: For the self-reflective moment in her work takes us far beyond familiar literary practices of self-attention and recursive discourse. Again and again this work reaches a genuinely mysterious interpenetration of vivid awareness, renewed language, and human care.SQUEEZED LIGHT includes all of Wolsak's previously published poetry to date, her essay in poetics An Heuristic Prolusion, an interview with the author, and an introductory essay by George Quasha with Charles Stein.

Squeezed Light

AmazonUs/INDPB

Lissa Wolsak, a poet who seemingly emerged fully-formed in the mid-1990s, now offers access to the realized body of her work in this collection. Neither easily classified nor directly traceable to a particular school or lineage, she stands instead within her own continuously evolving context-one as free of convention and fashion as it is independent of thought outside the work itself. The mirror would do well to reflect further, demands Jean Cocteau's Orphic radio voice, and Wolsak's poetry answers to this strange admonition: For the self-reflective moment in her work takes us far beyond familiar literary practices of self-attention and recursive discourse. Again and again this work reaches a genuinely mysterious interpenetration of vivid awareness, renewed language, and human care.SQUEEZED LIGHT includes all of Wolsak's previously published poetry to date, her essay in poetics An Heuristic Prolusion, an interview with the author, and an introductory essay by George Quasha with Charles Stein.

Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005

Station Hill Press @ Barrytown

This arresting long-poem belongs to of a larger body of work by Lissa Wolsak of which LIGHTSAIL is the 7th aspect. Reintroducing Time, Perception, civilization's emotional plight, the coincidentia oppositorum, Beauty and its deformation. Witness subductions from an urgent inscape one might perceive if sitting on the ledge of Saturn's outermost ring, legs dangling, vision through a third eye returning the Mother's originary gaze as the uttermost radical creative force it is. Hope for insight and ethical imagination, this work is uncommonly dimensionally relentless. A delicate structure of language is a nest, a hammock, a rope-bridge, a safety net, providing a partially elided view of the real, an oscillation between revelation and reveilment, illumination and occlusion, lightsail moves "beginninglessly" -world without end, in saecula saeculorum-at warpspeed and messing with our sense of scale, our self-orientation between intimate proximity and infinite distance-through our reading consciousness .. and where is our body? in the negative space between the words? the letters? the atoms? the planets? or in the light between us and those bodies? But yes, and yet, "we can speak/ face face/ the two of us/ tremulous the/ manner of being." -Maria Damon Poetry as transport. Lissa Wolsak's new book takes us sailing into & by means of a purifying light. An odd & awed journey, celestial & terrestrial, exploring & stating a geography that is perhaps the future home of consciousness. Statements, reports, questions arise in an enigmatic lyricism, at once archaic & futuristic. Welcome to what human being is becoming. -Hank Lazer, author of Thinking in Jewish (N20) and Evidence of Being Here: Beginning in Havana (N27) -

lightsail

Xexoxial Editions

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Books by Wolsak, Lissa

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

Of Beings Alone: The Eigenface

Squeezed Light

Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005

lightsail