Old Ways to Fold New Paper

Leza Lowitz's poems cross datelines, cultures and histories. With remarkable ease she combines moments of intense personal reflection and memory with insights into settings and events which have loomed over our century. These poems, placed in Key West, Chiapas, San Francisco, Berlin, Kyoto, Okinawa and Tokyo, are filled with unexpected gifts--the smell of rice cakes baking in tiny kitchens on the streets of Tokyo, a limbless toy soldier washed up on a beach in Okinawa, stones from a trout's belly piled "on the edge of the rough blue plate like a blessing in the rain." Lowitz's poems are like passionate letters from a traveler awake not only to what is around her but to the forces of nature and history which brought the present world to light.--Paul Bailiff, Creative Writing Department, San Francisco State University