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Lise Goett has won a Paris Review Discovery Award and an Academy of American Poets Prize, among many other honors. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Antioch Review.
This exemplary first collection is the lyric record of a contemplative spirit's going-forth, of her soul's discernment, the experience of personal and intimate communion, erotic passion and divine mystery, corporeal hunger and 'naught else but yearning' for the mysterium tremendum. There is a radiance about these poems, and a supplicant's willingness to lay bare the desire enshrined in her very selfhood. For this poet, music is the soul's correlative, the sheath that allows the journey to be borne. --Carolyn Forch This new poet relies on the telling of drastic things, even joy, even assent. She trusts to what the French call histoires, meaning trouble, meaning lies, meaning truth. For story organizes our mind and what faith we have: narrative is the final governance-as in these patient, swift poems--of the merest lyric cry. Just consider how Lise Goett begins a poem: 'Look up. Your life is suddenly ending-' and even more potently, how she ends one: ' . . . until something happens, /until a river runs through the house/and washes everything away: /then in the morning we'll rise, we'll begin, /to build our Babel again.' Poetic authority (as juridical, psychiatric, dramatic) is in the tale-bearing. Lise Goett is speaking for her life, and we are compelled to listen-she is a Scheherazade of the spirit. --Richard Howard
