DISASTER RELIEFrnrn
Disaster relief is always late
in coming, and when it arrives
no one knows what to do
first.
Building a tent in your backyard
while they rebuild the house
might be one way of claiming
your place when it no longer
exists,
saving face
when you’ve sold your heart
to the first person
who says “yes.”
Lewis Warsh is a poetry icon and a genius.
Dorothea Lasky
Alien Abduction is Lewis Warsh’s first full-length collection of poems since Inseparable (2008). Warsh extends his exploration of the way fragments of thought and feeling and experience come together to form the illusion of a solid object that can also explode into a million pieces at any moment. The whole is never the sum of its parts. A kind of doomsday hopelessness both invigorates and subdues all questions of what it means to be a living and breathing human. These poems are personal, direct, and elusive at the same time. An accomplished fiction writer, it’s no wonder that Warsh’s poems are often guided by hidden narratives, stories inside stories, with no beginning, middle, or end.
Cover by Max Warsh.
Lewis Warsh (1944–2020) was a key poet of the second generation New York School and—as a teacher, poet, mentor, and publisher of Angel Hair and United Artists Books—a significant figure in New York poetry communities for over 50 years. He authored over thirty volumes of poetry, fiction and autobiography, including Out of the Question: Selected Poems 1963–2003 (Station Hill Press), One Foot Out the Door: Collected Stories, A Place in the Sun (both from Spuyten Duyvil) and Inseparable: Poems 1995–2005 (Granary Books). With Ugly Duckling Presse, he published Alien Abduction and the chapbook Flight Test; his final book, Elixir, is forthcoming from UDP in 2022. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council of the Arts, The Poet’s Foundation and The Fund for Poetry. Mimeo Mimeo #7 was devoted to his poetry, fiction and collages, and to a bibliography of his work as a writer and publisher. He taught at Naropa University, The Poetry Project, Bowery Poetry, SUNY Albany and Long Island University (Brooklyn), where he was director of the MFA program in creative writing from 2007–2013. He lived in Manhattan and in Western Massachusetts.
Lewis Warsh is a poetry icon and a genius. His poems in Alien Abduction sing with a million inner and outer worlds that are both familiar and unfamiliar and speak of a new world of ideas and language that is timeless, gloriously happy and angry, and painstakingly beautiful. Warsh listens closely to everything, and in this book we find the mix of everything that makes up a life: Marx, Rousseau, sour milk, the songbook and the queen of hearts, mescaline, houses and bars and Paris. But in it too we find a life that is always strange because it is living and constantly changing and the eternal songs we must sing until the end of days and must thank Warsh for singing them first to us.
Dorothea Lasky
Nothing about Lewis Warsh's experiences is resolved, closed, or immune to his inner conflict. The reader follows him from an anecdotal phrase to a pan of the camera, from an often self-deprecatory meditation to droll truism, to astonishment at the obvious. He crafts his sequences so each relocation pertains, its simultaneity has purchase. Alien Abduction is as ambitious and successful as the best of his collections.
John Godfrey
"Rousseau said something about something." We lean in closer. We want to hear what this very intelligent and charming person is saying. But, no dice. Not only will we never learn what Rousseau said, we won't even know which Rousseau the poet meant. But no matter. We are so seduced by this voice that we follow it down endless corridors, onto street corners, into flittings of the mind that remind us at each turn of our own, they seem so natural, so un-created. That's a trick Lewis Warsh plays, a sleight-of-hand, never more deftly than in his most recent collection, Alien Abduction. Prepare to be abducted. And to enjoy every second of it.
Vincent Katz
In turn elegiac, discursive, ironic or deadpan, Lewis Warsh’s poems trip the real while revealing the incontrovertible logic of his lyric. What’s love got to do with it? Everything, for words and lovers are haunted by their absent objects in the same sublime way. Like a modern cross between Montaigne and Jabes, Warsh anatomizes this torment with the mastery and clarity of the possessed.
Chris Tysh
ISBN: 978-1-937027-43-8
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 136 pp, 5.5 x 8 in
Publication Date: May 01 2015
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Coach House Books via Publishers Group Canada (Canada), Inpress Books (UK)