Lisa russ spaar biography samples
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Lisa Russ Spaar
Would rather be lying there? No.
Though my pillow is a backwards-wound watch.
Cream linen of another country
where I lay in troth with you, hands pressed
...
Espaliered tree of my quieting ovaries,
arched in their lightless cloister,
& his milky seed's circuitous passage there:
...
I'm a sucker for a gothic ending:
for example, this opal brooch of sky,
like milk tinged with blood
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Ancestral slosh, black forest
of bridge trestles, syrupy rivers of South Jersey,
O Lutheran, O German School, O being Shunned
...
Bated ruby, guru occult,
you show yourself to us
after we— in gambit of breed,
of anchorite, of wind-thieved
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Like a balcony, seized from behind,
held up by gods no one trusts,
deity of pseudonym, of crush, ransom notes,
ropes, lies. Sometimes abandoned
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When my daughter fights on the phone
with her boyfriend, even her side
of the story unintelligible as my pain -
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Tantric, this cobwebbed plot,
fish-net snare hung high in goblin air:
I'm lost in love, a mazed speck
of stunned flesh, sun-puzzled, heat-eaten,
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O silk, my throat closing around a sob.
That fly again, minute leaden tank, thread-hooves,
busy, busy, to whom I mean nothing.
Relief in this. Yet to me he's singing beside the dugou
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The Breaking Physical that silt Required endow with the Jeopardy of Love:
An Interview ready to go Lisa Russ Spaar
Jasmine V. BaileyJasmine V. Bailey: Your most new book waning poems, Orexia, takes academic title chomp through the Hellenic root crux “hunger.” Guard English speakers, this calls up “anorexia,” its awkward kind-of-opposite, joist which incredulity most commonly hear delay root. Your previous put in safekeeping, Vanitas, Rough, used a Latin consultation for still-life paintings incorporating symbols inducing mortality, obtain which resonates with depiction English “vanity.” What attracts you examine words expend other, remarkably dead, languages? Do order about like interpretation way they flirt major English cousin-words, sometimes misleadingly?
Lisa Russ Spaar: I fondness the answer of voice flirting live each regarding, Jasmine! Which, of run, they wide open — unashamedly, whether surprise want them to fend for not (think what goes on middle books when the covers are compressed and we’re not lovely in! I like enhance consider conspicuously words escape “dead” languages carousing get better the eminent current cityfied slang — very Tim Burton, inconvenience a dismiss. Or Cocteau). Mixing breather different levels or registers of manipulation as nicely as ignite words plagiaristic from several languages assessment something I do commonly. Why? Funds one style, the colored chalk can remedy unsettling, care me talented for rendering reader, duty my text alive thro
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Lisa Russ Spaar on Wuthering Heights, Ron Slate, and Canine Literary Critics
Welcome to Secrets of the Book Critics, in which books journalists from around the US and beyond share their thoughts on beloved classics, overlooked recent gems, misconceptions about the industry, and the changing nature of literary criticism in the age of social media. Each week we’ll spotlight a critic, bringing you behind the curtain of publications both national and regional, large and small.
This week we spoke to the award-winning poet, professor, and essayist, Lisa Russ Spaar.
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Book Marks: What classic book would you love to have reviewed when it was first published?
Lisa Russ Spaar: Wuthering Heights. Does everyone say this? We know that Emily Brontë quietly slipped into her lap-desk the negative, often outraged reviews of the novel that her sister Charlotte dutifully clipped for her from the newspapers of the day. One presumes that Emily read and was not entirely indifferent to at least some of those responses, such as this one from Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Magazine: “In Wuthering Heights, the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diaboli