Poetry. In NIGHT SCENES, the fourth book from best-selling poet Lisa Jarnot, we are returned to the "first melody" through mock archaisms, neologisms, rollicking rhymes, and childlike delight. Her circling lyrics sing the pleasure of naming itself, with pastoral dreams occasionally giving way to waking life in Brooklyn. Like William Blake's songs, NIGHT SCENES privileges wonder over reason in a triumph of the imagination: "Be jumpy / or unhinged / with joy / enlightened / fry cakes / Staten hoy."

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1967, Lisa Jarnot studied with Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo and later earned an MFA at Brown University. The author of four full-length poetry collections and the former editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter, she has also just published Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus (University of California Press, 2012), the definitive biography of the San Francisco poet. Since the mid-1990s, she has lived in New York City.

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Gwyn McVay @ Gently Read Literature