https://www.lisarussspaar.com/lisaspaar daily 1.0 2023-05-12 https://www.lisarussspaar.com/about daily 0.75 2021-11-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/1628265620495-PGQAXKL5JWSMCC86N55A/Spaar.jpg About - Make it stand out Photo by Jen Fariello https://www.lisarussspaar.com/services daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/1626810962437-8PXEPO5D2ZBPEH1L9MZ5/Acquainted+with+the+Night.jpg Other Titles https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/1626811062468-CIUMEHGIXQRGWB0URKER/Orexia.jpg Other Titles https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/1626811128792-NUQIIBM2IL9SGG3ZG893/More+Truly+and+More+Strange.jpg Other Titles https://www.lisarussspaar.com/contact-1 daily 0.75 2021-11-28 https://www.lisarussspaar.com/madrigalia daily 0.75 2023-05-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/1629226505500-R8BHO58FFQAW0KDW3M7K/Madrigalia.jpeg Madrigalia - 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 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/1633972757723-CUMY7CU0DB6OSD39PKBO/Orexia.jpg Madrigalia https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/1633972984959-10CMRXZF17BPIGC8TI4R/satin%2Bcash.jpg Madrigalia https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/1633973054897-PE5OQVB96O970NHOGDZG/Vantias%2C+Rough.jpg Madrigalia https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/1633973239364-QNMYOPW4UGM9WWJW7YC4/Blue+Venus.jpg Madrigalia https://www.lisarussspaar.com/paradise-close daily 0.75 2025-12-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/1629226634097-N2IAP6BF8SO0O0LBUH63/Paradise+Close.jpeg Paradise Close - Paradise Close “Soulful, sexy, extraordinarily lyrical. . . . If this is what happens when poets write novels, they should all write them.”— Eleanor Henderson, author of The Twelve-Mile Straight and Everything I Have Is Yours This is a novel about vulnerability – an ache of a novel. In a way, its subject is how we feel our way through the world in order to have a life, helped by instinct and intuition, but also with the aid of kindness. It’s a tactile book; the sense of touch predominates, heightening our awareness of an omnipresent physicality. Flannery O’Connor wrote that “fiction operates through the senses.” Exactly – and here’s proof of how this creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader.— Ann Beattie “The child self, the emerging self, the aging self, any self—is always imperiled,” Spaar writes, near the poignant end of the novel. “Yet if it is glass-like in its breakability, its fragility, it is also glass-like in its tensility. Its obscurity, its clarity. Both.” Fitting, then, that the end of this novel is also an arrival, a new beginning. Both. Life, if you’re lucky, is long and amorphous, Spaar tells us. As you look back, allow yourself some grace.— The Adroit Journal In 1971, orphan Marlise Schade―fourteen, anorectic, and evicted from the psychiatric hospital her trust fund can no longer support―finds herself alone in an ancestral home during a blizzard. Marlise’s struggles to survive there become the focal point for a host of imperiled figures, living and dead, whose stories intersect with hers and with forces roiling the U.S. in the ’70s. Decades later, on the brink of Trump’s America, sixty-something Tee Handel is shaken by an inexplicable visitation. For years he’s nursed a deep hurt over his breakup with an alluring artist, spending his days and nights in solitude tinkering with antique clocks. What’s become of the artist, and how Tee reacts to his mysterious guest, testifies to the risk and certainty of change. These two seemingly unrelated tales entwine to show how the wages of the past are always with us, as are the dangerous and redemptive consequences of secrets confided and withheld. “This breathtaking novel has the dark power of a fairy tale. I read it all in one sitting, in thrall to the spell Lisa Russ Spaar casts with her cast of complex characters, a heartbreaking tribe of orphans, derelicts, and dreamers, all lost in deeply recognizable ways. I loved it.”—Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year and A Fortunate Age “Kaleidoscopic and moving, Paradise Close seamlessly spans the decades of its singular characters’ lives and their inextricable connections to one another. At the heart of this work is a convergence of secrets catalogued with longing. Lisa Russ Spaar looks intently at such fractured desires, piecing them back together, all while offering a culminating rush of heartbreak to the bloodstream.”—Jon Pineda, author of Let’s No One Get Hurt https://www.lisarussspaar.com/more-truly-and-more-strange daily 0.75 2021-11-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/1632783624317-4GL1FOE21NLEVS44IE9B/More+Truly+and+More+Strange.jpg More Truly and More Strange - More Truly and More Strange More Truly and More Strange collects astonishing American self-portrait poems from the mid-twentieth century onward. Through them, we encounter the ways great poets have, often disarmingly, perceived themselves, and, through their self-portraits, an ever-evolving gallery of American identity. Contributors include John Ashbery, Mary Jo Bang, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jericho Brown, Stephanie Burt, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Chen Chen, Robert Creely, Natalie Díaz, Rita Dove, Nick Flynn, Jorie Graham, Edward Hirsch, Major Jackson, Saeed Jones, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Donika Kelly, W. S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Gregory Pardlo, Carl Phillips, Sylvia Plath, Patrick Rosal, sam sax, Brenda Shaughnessy, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, James Tate, Natasha Tretheway, and many others. https://www.lisarussspaar.com/soulcake daily 0.75 2025-12-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f4d3cd72db40740f93bc1d/94cc4887-d54a-495a-9d8c-a1a54781901b/250917_Persea_Soul+Cake_OL.jpg Soul Cake - Soul Cake Lisa Russ Spaar’s seventh full-length collection of poems, Soul Cake, which takes its title from an ancient mummer/wassailer’s carol, leans with late-life, hibernal ecstasy into Spaar’s flood subjects: God hunger, soul-making, language, beauty, and an unquenched desire for the b/Beloved. Bodily and mysterious, the poems wrest from their rich, sumptuous, surprising lexicon flashes of dread, beyonding, and gnosis. “Lisa Russ Spaar is a poet who celebrates language as a world and, at the same time, exudes a profound love for the world that her language attempts, with passionate urgency, to signify. I have long loved the material extravagance of this language and the powerful life-force of her poems. Each line is an earthly musculature that's ripe and thrillingly on the verge of unruly. Soul Cake is a book of mortal and ecstatic wonder and rewards those of us who read with eye, ear, heart, and head—with our whole bodies.”—Jennifer Chang “Lisa Russ Spaar's brilliant lyricism lights up intricate surfaces and divines the depths in sonnets and carols tuned to every form of echo—rhyme, dream, heartache, etymology, memory. Exquisitely concentrated, haunted by epic ‘wonder lust,’ this is passionate metaphysical poetry to sate soul-hunger.”—Margaret Ross Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of a novel, Paradise Close; six acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems; and The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, a collection of poetry history and criticism. She was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Spaar has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where for many years she directed the MFA program. Publication date: May 5, 2026 Original trade paperback w/French flaps, 80 pages, ISBN 978-0-89255-642-7, 53/8 x 8¼”, $20.00, Poetry