Talisman

(Hardback)

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The poems in Lisa C. Krueger's Talisman interrogate the everyday expression of complex human emotions. In psychological portraits stunning in their precision, Krueger brings her observational powers to bear on the domestic and its darknesses--childbirth, play, sex, and family picnics, as well as abuse, disability, adultery, and mental illness. We see how intimacy is laced with uncertainty, how the bonds between us can be a form of bondage. Life's long arc is considered, from the early developmental stages of attachment and individuation to the existential dramas of purpose and meaning in middle and old age. What emerges is a study in the mystery of survival, in how we move beyond the broken places in ourselves. These poems magnify small, everyday redemptions as signs--talismans--of human potential, and ask us to think about our choices, to use language as a force to press against truth.

Reviews

"Lisa Krueger writes poetry of otherworldly precision. Her tiniest observations resonate with galvanic force. In this collection, rational thought is turned into exquisite music to invent a kind of new language with which to express the human experience. A cane, a broken tail; flat champagne and a safety pin; everything becomes a talisman--magical, ominous, life-changing. There is hardly a line, let alone a poem, in this collection that isn't surprising, memorable, and important."
--Laura Kasischke

"The wisdom and lyric grace in these new poems remind me of all that I have come to love about Lisa C. Krueger's work. They are quiet, and they hum with precision, like exquisite engines. But they are quick, darting, capable of astounding leaps; they lift off from one place and land in another, and suddenly I realize that I have traveled a great distance upon or within them. Yes, this is the deft and moving work of a poet who has discovered how to coax and unravel the mystery within the everyday. But Talisman also represents a furthering or deepening of Krueger's poetic agency. She is writing with even greater fearlessness, candor and wit about what it means to be human, to live subject to love, memory, desire, and regret. These poems give me heart. Very often in their lines, I feel 'the world / opening its arms.'"
--Tracy K. Smith

"Talisman is a book that begins in tragedy but ends by evoking a strange and secret joy. In between are the formal constraints life brings. Lisa Krueger mirrors these constraints with poems that move inside their own formal considerations with both assurance and amazement. What a pleasure."
--Jim Moore

"In the first poem of Lisa Krueger's Talisman, a metal halo is attached to the skull of the poet's sister, who is thus transformed into a kind of wounded angel, the first of many tutelary spirits whose suffering and strength give this book an unusually profound emotional depth. Krueger's poems oscillate between life's grave dualities: sickness and health, marriage and infidelity, loyalty and betrayal. There is no pleasure without a corresponding measure of pain in her poems, where life is balanced on an often-cruel indeterminacy. Her sister's devastating injury, her daughter's illness and her mother's death, are balanced against the birth of her children, and her children's children, but Krueger is too serious a poet to succumb to an easy reckoning. Her poems do not offer the consolation of a contrived resolution, but they do give us an opportunity to 'glory in the waste of the world.'" --Gary Young

Author Bio

Lisa C. Krueger is a poet and psychologist. She is the author of two previous books of poetry, Rebloom and animals the size of dreams. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Atlanta Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She has written a series of interactive journals related to psychology and creativity. She maintains a private therapy practice focused on womens issues, health psychology, writing therapy, and the role of creativity in wellness. She lives in Pasadena, California.