Poetry. SQUEEZED LIGHT includes all of Wolsak's previously published poetry to date, her essay in poetics "An Heuristic Prolusion," an interview with the author, and an introductory essay by George Quasha with Charles Stein. Lissa Wolsak, a poet who seemingly emerged fully-formed in the mid-1990s, now offers access to the realized body of her work in this collection. Neither easily classified nor directly traceable to a particular school or lineage, she stands instead within her own continuously evolving context--one as free of convention and fashion as it is independent of thought outside the work itself. "The mirror would do well to reflect further," demands Jean Cocteau's Orphic radio voice, and Wolsak's poetry answers to this strange admonition: For the self-reflective moment in her work takes us far beyond familiar literary practices of self-attention and recursive discourse. Again and again this work reaches a genuinely mysterious interpenetration of vivid awareness, renewed language, and human care.
Author City: Vancouver, BC CAN
Lissa Wolsak is a poet, goldsmith, and energy-field therapist living in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has published several essays and long poem sequences, at times crossing these genres in her works.
Reviews and Other Links
Hank Lazer in Rain Taxi
James Wagner @ Esther Press
“All past poets, in particular, Pound and Zukofsky, were not porous enough. Lissa Wolsak subtends as egregiously porous. She pours tenacious slipperiness every which way—how very yes.”
—Madeline Gins
“It’s not that Lissa Wolsak’s words are made up, but that the words have made up a relation between themselves that is of the author. In order for isolate words to be continuous ‘acts of symmetry,’ they are ‘to move through that silence which linear language admits, its lack of fullness, its utter necessity.’ Her words are this non-random arising in necessity.”
—Leslie Scalapino
“I am still learning to read Lissa Wolsak—an immensely entertaining and demanding project. I am being reeducated in the pleasures of using the dictionary to discover how awareness of the roots and branches of words tightens their hold on the world.”
—Charles Altieri