The best of the poet Lyn Lifshin, selected from her work from 1970 through 1996.
Lifshin writes with energy, fire, and truth of the common world of experience. Bearing signs of struggle, pain, and loss, these poems carry the history of the body with agony and pride, as enduring tokens of what it is to be alive.
things I have and
don't have
come from this
moving between people like leaves like
smoke.
-from "Drifting"
Contents include Onyxvelvet (Autobiography), After Dark My Sweet (Love and Erotica), Despite Everything (Family), Blissful Misfits and Secret Faces (Other People), Black Trillium and Apricot Wind (Place). The journal, Choice, called this collection, "Magnificently crafted poems...concise field reports from a woman warrior at the front line of feeling."
"Magnificently crafted poems, terse as needlework" (Choice), these concise field reports from a woman warrior at the front lines of feeling confirm the suggestion of Ed Sanders that Lyn Lifshin qualifies as "a modern Emily Dickinson".
Charismatic little-magazine legend and muse, longtime keeper of the flame of the poem, Lifshin writes with energy, fire and truth of the common world of experience to which our passional lives commit us. Bearing signs of struggle, pain and loss, her work can turn in a heart beat and joy is never refused.
Like images of battle on a shield or decorative scars, these poems carry the history of the body with agony and pride, as enduring tokens of what it is to be alive.
