Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition

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Description

• Fishman has strong ties to the Objectivist movement and writers such as Louis Zukofsky and, especially, Lorine Niedecker, and this has potential to be be considered a major work participating in this lineage.
• Both the rural (Driftless, central Wisconsin) and urban (Chicago) Midwest feature prominently in the book; it should find interest with audiences in these regions.
• The book deals richly with natural history and ecology and should appeal to readers of all genres interested in nature writing.
• This is a ranging, ambitious project, artfully collecting material from a 16-year span in spacious arrangements that allow numerous interpretations and resonances, yet this scale is neatly contained in an approachable book that should invite classroom and reading group engagements.
• Fishman has a strong interest in reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival, but she also has plans for reading on both the East and West coasts and, especially, in Canada, where she has dual citizenship.

Reviews

Much like the sudden odor of rain or dry leaves rustling, these exquisite poems are not outside the common world. Rather, they are found entirely within it--in the sounds, smells, feel of a life, of each day's sun and its fading, of what we can know of one another. Lisa Fishman writes with an impeccable sense of cadence, of words as sounds too, of physical fact becoming thought and then recurring as poetry.
--Robert Creeley

Lisa Fishman is a writer who works--confidently, brilliantly--in close-up, often phrase to phrase, building texts that knock you over with their rhythms & insights even though it would be very difficult indeed to paraphrase what she's doing.
--Ron Silliman

This is a world in the midst of creation, an Ars Poetica of everything.
--Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

Lisa Fishman is the author of 24 Pages and other poems (Wave, 2015), F L O W E R C A R T (Ahsahta Press, 2011), Current (Parlor Press, 2011) and The Happiness Experiment (Ahsahta, 2009). A North American writer (US and Canadian), Fishman is working on dividing her time between Wisconsin, where she currently lives, and somewhere across the border.