Description
Poetry. ALIEN ABDUCTION is Lewis Warsh's first full-length collection of poems since INSEPARABLE (2008). Warsh extends his exploration of the way fragments of thought and feeling and experience come together to form the illusion of a solid object that can also explode into a million pieces at any moment. The whole is never the sum of its parts. A kind of doomsday hopelessness both invigorates and subdues all questions of what it means to be a living and breathing human. These poems are personal, direct, and elusive at the same time. An accomplished fiction writer, it's no wonder that Warsh's poems are often guided by hidden narratives, stories inside stories, with no beginning, middle, or end.
"Lewis Warsh is a poetry icon and a genius. His poems in ALIEN ABDUCTION sing with a million inner and outer worlds that are both familiar and unfamiliar and speak of a new world of ideas and language that is timeless, gloriously happy and angry, and painstakingly beautiful. Warsh listens closely to everything, and in this book we find the mix of everything that makes up a life: Marx, Rousseau, sour milk, the songbook and the queen of hearts, mescaline, houses and bars and Paris. But in it too we find a life that is always strange because it is living and constantly changing and the eternal songs we must sing until the end of days and must thank Warsh for singing them first to us."—Dorothea Lasky
Author Bio
Lewis Warsh (1944-2020) was a writer, editor, visual artist, educator and the author of over thirty volumes of poetry, fiction, and autobiography, including THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005), Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005 (2008), A Place in the Sun (2010), One Foot Out the Door: Collected Stories (2014), ALIEN ABDUCTION (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), OUT OF THE QUESTION: SELECTED POEMS 1963- 2003 (Station Hill Press, 2017), PIECE OF CAKE (Station Hill Press, 2020), and ELIXIR (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022). He was co-founder, with Bernadette Mayer, of United Artists Magazine and Books, and co-founder and editor, with Anne Waldman, of Angel Hair Books and Magazine and The Angel Hair Anthology (2001). Mimeo Mimeo #7 (2012) was devoted to his poetry, fiction and collages, and to a bibliography of his work as a publisher and editor. He was a recipient of grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The American Poetry Review, and The Poetry Foundation. He taught at Naropa University, The Poetry Project, Pace University, The New School, Bowery Poetry Club, and SUNY Albany. A longtime member of the English Department faculty at Long Island University (Brooklyn), he was also the founding director of their MFA Program in Creative Writing (2007-13).
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA