The Invention of Culture

Poetry. THE INVENTION OF CULTURE is the third full-length collection of poems by Lisa Samuels, whose second volume, Paradise for Everyone, also appeared with Shearsman. The poems in this new collection mix prosodic syncopation with prose syntax and floating page space, as though the page were not only paper but also skin, film, 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, present dreams, compound love songs and dirges--whose inhabitable spatial structures are like event horizons that mean to let you come back to the world.