Poetry. "In THE SEVEN VOICES, 'each poem is an abstract correlative of a subjective experience, a "refraction journal." Everything means exactly what it says.' Lisa Samuels writes as if basing language on something it is not; or as if (all) language, having no content, makes the motions of something else. So she deliberately voids the language as a daring means of creating an alternate that isn't in language as if outside by being the same as language. The writing shapes 'A tonal synchrony' in which the senses can correspond to something else (rather than to that synchrony). This correspondence occurs awkwardly by 'inaccommodation with the very shape.' Yet the synchrony holds so that 'that singularity is a violation of perspective.' She says about THE SEVEN VOICES, 'The title arises from Gnostic mysticism: the voices are angelic entities inhabiting the Treasury of Light. Apparently there are seven voices.' And 'nothing that happens is possible, so continuity and destructuring coexist across the falls'"--Leslie Scalapino.

Author City: AUCKLAND NZ

Lisa Samuels grew up in the United States, Sweden, and the Middle East. She has a PhD from the University of Virginia, where she wrote her dissertation on Laura Riding, Wallace Stevens, and academic poetry criticism. She publishes on Riding and other modernist and contemporary poets as well as on subjects such as linguistic beauty, poetic analysis, and intellectual property. She taught in Utah, Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Michigan before moving to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2000 to teach poetry writing and literature. In 2006, she took up a position as Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.