Cold Comfort: Selected Poems, 1970-1996

by Lyn Lifshin

The best of the poet Lyn Lifshin, selected from her work from 1970 through 1996.

Lifshin writes with energy, fire, and truth of the common world of experience. Bearing signs of struggle, pain, and loss, these poems carry the history of the body with agony and pride, as enduring tokens of what it is to be alive.

things I have and
don’t have
come from this
moving between people like leaves like
smoke.
―from “Drifting”

Contents include Onyxvelvet (Autobiography) , After Dark My Sweet (Love and Erotica) , Despite Everything (Family) , Blissful Misfits and Secret Faces (Other People) , Black Trillium and Apricot Wind (Place) . The journal, Choice , called this collection, “Magnificently crafted poems...concise field reports from a woman warrior at the front line of feeling.”

Genres: Poetry

278 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1997

About the author

Lyn Diane Lifshin (1942) is an American poet and teacher.

Born in Barre, VT, she was raised in Middlebury, VT. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Vermont (writing a thesis on Dylan Thomas). She also studied at Brandeis University, the Bread Loaf School of English and attended the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference.

Lifshin moved to Schenectady, NY in the 1970s with her then husband who worked for General Electric. She enrolled in a doctoral program in English at SUNY Albany, and began submitting her work for publication. She quickly began appearing in a variety of literary magazines. When she left SUNY, she began teaching creative writing workshops at various public venues such as libraries as well as at her home in Niskayuna, NY. Eventually, she began earning a living primarily from workshops, readings, and visiting faculty positions.

Lifshin has been called "The Queen of the Lit Mags" and "The Queen of Modern Romance Poetry". Over 120 books and chapbooks of her work have been published. She has also edited 4 anthologies (appearing in innumerable others) and was the subject of the award winning documentary film, Not Made of Glass. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and cultural publications, including The American Scholar, Christian Science Monitor, Ploughshares, nthWORD, Blue Lake Review, Dunes Review, and Rolling Stone Magazine.

Bibliographers and literary critics would be hard-pressed to find a literary journal that has not published at least one Lifshin poem at one time or another. To date, however, there is no comprehensive bibliography of her publications and unpublished manuscripts.

She currently divides her time between a home in Niskayuna, NY and a residence in Virginia.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Scott Holstad · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I've known Lyn personally going back to the 1980s and as "Queen of the Small Presses," I saw her in every damn magazine I came across for decades. And I would buy, obtain or she'd send me copies of new books and chapbooks over the years so that while I only have a fraction of the roughly 150 books she published over the years, most are among my favorites and this is definitely one of them. This was Lifshin's first book to be published by Black Sparrow Press, Bukowski's publisher (and I think about the same time another old friend, Edward Field, started getting some of his books also published by Black Sparrow), and it was the biggest one of hers I had seen to date at close to 300 pages, or what I would call "average" for Black Sparrow book sizes. Lyn had a lot more complexity and talent than some people give her credit for, and I'm thinking of certain academics, none of whom will ever accomplish even 1% of what Lyn did, but all of whom with their big 2 damn books in hand have the temerity to look down on her as "inferior" because she wasn't part of "the Academy" (despite spending time teaching a year here and there at many schools such as Syracuse). And yes, I actually had a good, but mainstream academic writer, friend use that phrase. I tried not to be pissed off. After all, most of the academics who are critics of she, Bukowski, the old Beats, the slam scene, confessional poetry, etc., are quick to tout themselves and each other as descendents of Keats, Byron, Cummings, Thomas, etc., but few can match those old masters and more importantly, note the world "old." These academics are stuck in ancients decades and centuries and either haven't realized or cared that they've been killing any interest in poetry from non-academics, explaining their sad press runs of 250-750 books, no matter how many awards they win, because while they may master craft, they have little concept of actual LIFE for you and me and most people outside the Ivory tower, so remembering back to a standard university lit review (and yes, I've been published in many, but rejected by more), I recall one of its average issues having poems with titles such as "Sunset at Deer Late," "Robins at Sunrise," "Mysteries of the Pond's Ripples" and other bullshit like that, boring most people to tears until some are lucky enough to happen upon "less talented" (actually meaning "less formal") populists who are writing not only confessional, but experimentally (the LANGUAGE poets of some decades ago, the surrealists, etc.,), and who are writing about topics and things in life that are REAL to most people who don't have the luxury of taking sabbaticals to go mentally masturbate, accomplish little while looking down your nose at everyone else. Most of the rest of us have to actually work! Ferlinghetti busted his ass to make his bookstore a success in the Italian North Beach section of SF while also making his new publishing company successful as he was being prosecuted for publishing Ginsberg. Also found time to write the best selling book of American poetry in history in A Coney Island of the Mind, a book that changed my life in changing my understanding of poetry, allowing me to learn those rules dictated to you in classes are constructs created by the untalented dictators and they exist to be smashed, which is what so many more interesting, popular, meaningful, influential poets of actual substance have been helping to save poetry from the destruction that was being wrought on it by academia. Thank god! The irony about Lyn is, the Academy is wrong, just like my friend was (who was the director of the creative writing program at a big university). In this big book, rest assured all of these poems had been published in magazines before being collected to make up this book and most assuredly appeared in hundreds of the "small press magazines," she and others were known for but while she could have included those in the Acknowledgments, it's almost funny to see the huge acknowledgments page so full of largely only mainstream literary journals of high quality that few academics so critical of her could barely match it! Revenge is sweet. (A small arbitrary sample: Chicago Review, Georgia Review, Carolina Quarterly, North American Review, Ploughshares, Long Shot, The Sun, New Delta Review, Chelsea, Christian Science Monitor, Caliban, Literary Review, Mudfish, Denver Review, Cream City Review, Wormwood Review, ACM, Grain, Puerto Del Sol, Hollins Critic, Free Lunch, Midwest Quarterly, Hiram Poetry Review, and on and on and you get the picture, right? Yeah, like usual, the academic snobs are wrong. Just because she mixed with the masses didn't mean she couldn't play in their yards too, and more and better while at it.

Lyn was loved and appreciated by millions and I hope she'll get her just due fully one day. I feel privileged that while I was serving as poetry editor for Ray's Road Review for some years, I had worked to build the quality of submissions and works published to a very high degree, during which time our acceptance rate dropped from 40% to below 2% and we went from largely unknown, uncredited writers (nothing wrong with that -- we were all there once and as long as the stuff was good, I published first timers alongside household names) to contributors whose credits typically included Poetry, NYQ, Partisan Review, Rattle, Paris Review, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, etc. Even had an 8-time Jeopardy winner. While I was publishing writers I like and respect who have credibility and credits like Simon Perchik, Alan Catlin, Dancing Bear, Marilyn Kallet, Clifton Snider, etc., Lyn naturally sent me some stuff and naturally I liked it and accepted most of it, prompting her to immediately send me more -- even though we were booked 2-3 issues ahead and she wouldn't be published for 6-12 months. AND while one normally submits 3-5 poems, she would send me 75 pages on average each time. As a result, without ever intending or even really discussing it, I was able to publish some two full books of hers in serial format and I loved having her aboard as a publisher, rather than a competitor -- I mean fellow contributor in some many mags.

Thus, about a year ago when I got the news that she had just died, it hit me damn hard and I had to take a deep breath. Possibly shed a tear or two. I remember going to visit her at her condo in DC decades ago. I remember trying to compete with her, back when people were describing me as the male version of Lifshin because I was so prolific. But honestly, so many old friends, colleagues and even heroes and mentors in this community have been dying over the past few years that it's gotten really hard for me. Ferlinghetti a couple of years ago. Dare I call him a friend? We spent time chatting, he gave me a million autographed books, he gave one of my books a back cover plug. About the same time, another Beat poet, old friend Diane di Prima, who I'd enjoyed a great relationship with died. She lived in the same pad as Amy Tan in SF, got together with me when she came down to LA. And joined by fellow Beat writer Michael McClure. Shit! And since then I've been finding more and more have died during the past 5-6 years that my health has forced me "underground," so to speak, and no longer part of the scene, no longer up on the news. So I've learned far too late of the deaths of Will Inman, Walt Phillips, Todd Moore and hell, I was looking through the contents of an archive of an old friend in Stanford's Special Collections and I realized half the people were damn dead now but the worst was when Gerry Locklin died last January thanks to COVID, or what I like to say, thanks to the white christian nationalist science denying alt right republicans. Bastards! Proof of no god right there. It's gotten so that I've started trying to find old writer colleagues who are still alive because I fear I may be the last one standing and I always thought I'd be one of the first to go. Alphabeat Press's Dave Christy just died a few months ago. Good old Ed Field is approaching 100 and I don't want to jinx that. I know Cat Townsend and Belinda Subraman are still out there, and I think I've heard Dan Nielsen is still around, but Gerry? Lyn? Life is cruel.

Look, Lyn was famous for her Madonna poem series and for a million other things, but she was damn talented and I think this is a great book to either get to know her or to relish reading her again. I can't recommend this more fervantly. Get it!

[W.B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of those poets "serious" writers are so quick to completely dismiss, which is sad. Her poems have an immediacy and a genuineness. She does stay on the safer side of the imagery sometimes. She doesn't really reckon the innovations in form which have taken place in literature over the last fifty years or so, but that's not punishable by law. The strongest poems are often the poems NOT about personal relationships; often these stronger poems explore various forms of cultural address. Unfortunately, the majority of the poems tend to be about the frustration of personal relationships, amorous or otherwise. She's a poet you can just start reading on the street and people will respond. She's got that part down perfectly. I like her writing...it's just you have to sift to find the little jewels...confession: "Condom Chain Leter" is probably one of the funniest poems I've read in the past few years...very sharp....

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

She has a loose, beguiling style. When she hits--and she does often--she can send electricity up your spine.