Madrigalia
New & Selected Poems
This career-spanning volume portrays in stunning fashion Lisa Russ Spaar’s exquisite obsessions: spiritual hunger, lingual pleasures, bodily decay. Whether writing of the erotic or the divine, of anorexia or insomnia, of fairy tale or literary history, Spaar’s writing is unmistakably her own, a trove of music and magic like nothing else in contemporary poetry.
“Lisa Russ Spaar’s Madrigalia features a riveting suite of new poems that need to be read aloud and savored to fully experience the unexpected twists, virtuoso lexicon, and erotic charge. From book to book, in the gathering momentum of these selected poems, she is writing, indelibly, thrillingly, by and against the transient light of a meteor shower, “And this // is how you’ll know me, after I’m erased. / In any place you are, I’ll wear your face.”—Arthur Sze
Lisa Russ Spaar’s Madrigalia in the New York Times Book Review
Selected previous collections by Lisa Russ Spaar
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Orexia
“The poems are often erotic, but their sexiness is transformed by greater questions and wonderment. . . . Orexia is filled with the desire for life, for the world, for surprise.”—L. A. Johnson, Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Satin Cash
“A beautiful and compelling portrait of the mind at prayer.”—Image
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Vantias, Rough
“Urgent, hungry, and unabashedly sensual, Spaar arrives time and again at visceral and eviscerating epiphanies.”—Andy Nicole Bowers, Boston Review
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Blue Venus
“[Blue Venus] is a virtuoso book, ambitiously beautiful.”—Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times