Animal Husbandry by Susan Lewis

(5 customer reviews)

$14.00

I am grateful for the generous beauty of this collection. Language informs the remarkable poems it contains as much as the sensuous truths that attend the memory of experience. Because of this, and the lyrical skill that gracefully unites them, they are possessed of a startling and passionate clarity.

—CHUCK WACHTEL

 

Animal Husbandry is an accomplished set of playful and bracing poems. The   temperature rises with feverish melodic articulations of ironies and transpositions. Emoticons express passion with rare pleasure, folded into the practice of breeding, this time with lines of verse.“Dots dance on paper,/molecules bump, so listen” to these coy, funny and haunting poems.

—NORMA COLE

 

Animal Husbandry is a playful and rigorous rediscovery of poetry’s ability to make linguistic conceptual abstraction into sensory experience, and vice versa. It invites readers to share not only the intellection but also the affective energies of its sung queries about how the “all this too much we know now” suffuses our erotic, political, and parental lives. These poems orchestrate tone, melody, rhythm, and syntax to bring across the urgency of their nuanced questioning about matters stretching from our origin as a species to all too recent political catastrophes. With their gift for formal and stylistic compression, for condensation laced with startling shifts of speed and sound, these poems transform the necessary limitations of the coin of the realm into the making of virtuoso turns on a dime.

—ROBERT KAUFMAN

Category:

Description

Animal Husbandry

by Susan Lewis

$14, paper

SUSAN LEWIS (susanlewis.net) is the editor of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of nine books and chapbooks, including Heisenberg’s Salon (Blazevox, 2017), This Visit (Blazevox, 2015), How to be Another (Cervena Barva Press, 2014), and State of the Union (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014). Her poetry has appeared in a great number of anthologies and journals, including The Awl, Berkeley Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Cimarron, Diode, Gargoyle, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, Prelude, Raritan, Seneca Review, So to Speak, Verse, Verse Daily, and VOLT.

5 reviews for Animal Husbandry by Susan Lewis

  1. HelloKitty –

    5 out of 5 stars – Subtle and Brilliant New Poems
    By HelloKitty on February 16, 2009
    Format: Paperback
    This book of poetry is riveting. The imagery created by Susan Lewis‘ fluid and elegant language are by turns seductive and slightly scary. The intimacy that she she shares with us is truly original. A brilliant new voice. I love the cover art, it is a perfect compliment to the poems.

  2. Elizabeth –

    5 out of 5 stars – From cover art to poems–a delight of distilled words about human beings in relationship
    By Elizabeth on February 4, 2009
    Format: Paperback
    Susan Lewis‘s new chapbook is enchanting, enticing and wise. From the cover art to the poems, there is an aliveness to this collection that wakes the reader up time and time again with a delightful, but kind jolt. The book sits next to my bed where I can savor it slowly. What a treat to explore brilliantly chiseled, sculptural poems about our humble efforts to be in relationship.

  3. Dylan Ungerleider –

    5 out of 5 stars – Fun for the whole family!
    By Dylan Ungerleider on January 26, 2009
    Format: Paperback
    Our family, teenage boys and parents, enjoyed sitting around the fireplace and reading this collection. The language is fresh, surprising, and fun. I personally felt washed and awakened in the fearless awareness of Lewis’ phrases, and tickled by the playful novelty of how she brings words together. My son said, why don’t you just write: “Two thumbs up!”

  4. Billy Stoneham –

    5 out of 5 stars – The Natural
    By Billy Stoneham on January 19, 2009
    Format: Paperback
    Susan Lewis seems to me like a less austere and more playful Louise Gluck. Like Gluck’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Wild Iris, Lewis’s Animal Husbandry attains its unsentimental force by favoring observations of the natural world over cliched expressions of human emotion. When Lewis envies how “any flower knows /when to drop its thoughtless pollen,” or ruminates that she has “heard that fishes cry, / undaunted by their muffling element,” we trust keen observations of nature as much as we appreciate the simple, unforgettable expression in which they are embodied. This first collection shows is author to be both a naturalist and a natural.

  5. poetry lover –

    5 out of 5 stars – A provocative collection
    By poetry lover on January 18, 2009
    Format: Paperback
    This is a provocative collection – sexy, humorous, very intelligent, sometimes challenging, always compelling. Highly recommended!

Add a review

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related products