Orexia: Poems [Paperback]

Thrumming with the triune hungers of mind, mouth, and spirit, Lisa Russ Spaars fifth book plumbs daily life in order to transcend it, discovering and embodying the sacred and erogenous as it does so. Seductive and symphonic,Poet, essayist, and anthologist Spaar ('Orexia' contains elegiac tributes to those passed and cameos by brilliant women writers of cloistered yearnings, Dickinson and Wordsworth (Dorothy, not William). But its true pulse lies in the poets Keatsian considerations of nature to consider herself, the baroque effulgence of her (unbeatable) lexicon balanced by her competing impulse to give it to us straight.Spaar is invested in truth-telling, but through stripping language of its common colloquial associations, its unthoughtful dispatches. This is the opposite of propaganda, wherein the words remain enshrouded in so many associations and interpretations that they can have persuasive, and yet, indeterminate meanings. Spaars poetry shows that to think of the appetite on one side and our language capacity on the other is a false dichotomy. Our particular human hunger is for survival and for meaning at once, for survival through the meaning that words give our world. We are beings who are hungry for meaning and this is precisely makes language used for ill so dangerous. It is also how language, when used for beauty, can lend us back our lives.In sensual newpoems, Lisa Russ Spaar explores the physical and spiritual desires oflate-middle age, showcasing as she does so her magical capacity to entwine thecolloquial and baroque, the explicit and the ethereal.