Lyn Lifshin

Softcover 288 pages ISBN 1–57423–198–7 $18.95 Another Woman Who Looks Like Me new poems by Lyn Lifshin “Lifshin is here to stay. For men, she’s sexy. For women, she’s an archetype of gutsy independence. As a poet, she’s nobody but herself. Frighteningly prolific and utterly intense. One of a kind.” —San Francisco Review of Books It is Lyn Lifshin’s gift to seem perfectly artless, to make poems of immediacy and power from the humblest of near-to-hand materials. Her themes are the classic themes of lyric poetry—the innocence of childhood, the ecstasy of sex, the mystery of death—and her word choices are the poetic equivalents of the artist’s circles, squares, and primary colors. Just as Alexander Calder could make a lion out of a coat hanger, Lyn Lifshin can make something memorable out of a handful of even the most familiar English words—mother, daughter, wind, moon, lover, horses, roses. Something memorable, something fresh and entirely her own. Blue Sunday imagining that he slips from her the way rings do from a finger in the cold. Leaves. October, black spots on the mirror. Separation blues in the bed. Touching his shoulders here on paper, he’s like all the flowers that I draw, bright wild petals that don’t connect to any stem   Softcover, 244 pages ISBN: 1-57423-114-6 1999, $17.95 Hardcover, 224 pages ISBN: 1-57423-115-4 1999, $28.95   Before It’s Light new poems by Lyn Lifshin Lyn Lifshin’s is a reader’s poetry—immediate and accessible, seemingly artless, conveying complex, womanly truths with an everyday vocabulary. To describe it as a kind of feminine folk art is not to condescend; it is instead to recognize in it the naked power of a Bessie Smith blues lyric, the stirring eroticism of a burley-q fan dance, even, on occasion, the simple, balanced beauty of a Shaker quilt. Before It’s Light is Lifshin’s latest collection, and her largest and strongest to date. “These direct, spare, autobiographical poems evoke memories of an unlovely girlhood ... a stormy marriage ... the pain of losing a mother ... the struggle to regain self-sufficiency after bad relationships. As always, Lifshin trawls deep waters of submerged passion beneath the surface of everyday life, coming up with a teeming, glistening catch.” —Tom Clark   Softcover, 280 pages ISBN: 1-57423-040-9 1997 $15.95 Cold Comfort: Selected Poems 1970-1996 by Lyn Lifshin "Magnificently crafted poems, terse as needlework" (Choice)—these concise field reports from a woman warrior at the front line of feeling confirm the suggestion of Ed Sanders that Lyn Lifshin qualifies as "a modern Emily Dickinson." 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. Not Quite Spring— Baby you know I get high on you, come back with me whispering in her ear it was all she could do to say no, spring leaves budding his hand on her breast crocus smell an everything unfolding she gasping I want, I would but instead hurrying back to the windowless room where she locks the heavy door. Lemons are rotting on her pillow, she studies her nipples, nyloned crotch in mirror then hugs her huge body to sleep