What do you think?
Rate this book
Lost Alphabet
In an interview, Lisa Olstein has said, "I don't want poetry to limit itself to reflecting or recapitulating experience; I want it to be an experience." In her daring new book, an unnamed lepidopterist—living in a hut on the edge of an unidentified village—is drawn ever deeper into unexpected engrossing worlds. Structured as a naturalist's notebook, yet suggesting an ars poetica, this five-part sequence of prose poems creates a layered pilgrimage into the consequences of intensive study, the trials of being an outsider, and the process of metamorphosis. Along with the speaker's enigmatic companion Ilya, who arrives one day and never leaves, the reader embarks on a journey through the paradoxes that imbue desire, the waywardness of intention, and the power of experience to transform.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2009
3 people are currently reading
77 people want to read
About the author
Lisa Olstein
12 books17 followersLisa Olstein was born and raised near Boston, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, undertaking additional studies at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts and Harvard Divinity School. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is co-founder of the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action and a contributing editor of jubilat.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 21, 2017
Poems about moths
June 4, 2016
I have a mild but longstanding mottephobia. I'm also skeptical when moths and butterflies appear in literature because I've read one too many texts that use them as easy metaphors for transformation. The amazing Amanda Niehaus recommended this book to me, though, as a field guide for my new adventures, and so I set aside my aversions and cynicism and settled down with Lost Alphabet.
I sprawled in the grass and sat with these poems even as dozens of tiny leafhoppers swarmed me, even as it began to rain. I dogeared pages--apologies to the public library patrons who will come after me--and reread poems over and over because they quietly ask for that kind of attentiveness. Indeed, it's the slow, careful attention that the poems evoke that struck me most, the way the speaker adapts her body and mind to the delicate nature of the moths with which she lives. When the narrator's hut is filled with moths, when she moves from studying them to caring for them, when she learns them so well she can differentiate them by weight as they land on her skin, by rights I should have been creeped out--did I mention the mottephobia?--but instead I was filled with wonder. And there is transformation in the arc of the book, but much of it isn't overtly metaphorical but grounded in the moths themselves: the acute observation of their growth through larval and adult stages, the change in how the narrator relates to the moths ("I didn't mean to be so hungry, as if they exist for my comprehension alone").
I won't subject anyone who's read this far to an account of all my favorite lines from the book, but I will include here the poem that sticks with me, beginning to end, because I love a good contradiction:
I sprawled in the grass and sat with these poems even as dozens of tiny leafhoppers swarmed me, even as it began to rain. I dogeared pages--apologies to the public library patrons who will come after me--and reread poems over and over because they quietly ask for that kind of attentiveness. Indeed, it's the slow, careful attention that the poems evoke that struck me most, the way the speaker adapts her body and mind to the delicate nature of the moths with which she lives. When the narrator's hut is filled with moths, when she moves from studying them to caring for them, when she learns them so well she can differentiate them by weight as they land on her skin, by rights I should have been creeped out--did I mention the mottephobia?--but instead I was filled with wonder. And there is transformation in the arc of the book, but much of it isn't overtly metaphorical but grounded in the moths themselves: the acute observation of their growth through larval and adult stages, the change in how the narrator relates to the moths ("I didn't mean to be so hungry, as if they exist for my comprehension alone").
I won't subject anyone who's read this far to an account of all my favorite lines from the book, but I will include here the poem that sticks with me, beginning to end, because I love a good contradiction:
[the uppermost is fire]
My legs fill with smoke. Jagged stones rattle and grind. I'm restless until stilled, dumb and unsound, a body of contradictions: I love almost anything, can stand to be near very little. I go numb. I am sensitive to the gentlest movement of air. I'm reckless. I'm fearful, nervous even of the tame village strays. I talk too much, too loudly, unable to find the simplest words.
Read
August 5, 2010Culture asks much of the writer: filter the cacophony, exceed vernacular, deliver art. The writer may use familiar language to build an extraordinary world, to make an unusual character an analog for the self, to transform that self into a friend. She may excel at documentation, recording observations in exquisite lines that juxtapose agricultural ritual with scientific discovery, interior reflection with external reproach. Poet Lisa Olstein is this writer. In “Lost Alphabet” (Copper Canyon, 2009) she gives readers a collection of moths, a mysterious companion, a dark hut in an unusual country, and the eyes of a lepidoptrist asking perennial questions: What does it mean to know? Are there limits to understanding? Even in company are we anything but alone?
Slowly, the absence of pain arrives like
snow falling. It was on a day like this when, visiting, Ilya
decided to stay. At least, never left. It is customary here to
accompany the wounded. Whoever is able, and near.
Each poem is an illustrated plate colored by detail — the work of writer as collector. We learn that Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” brushes against the atmosphere of Marco Polo’s travel diaries, that Olstein was captivated by a landscape of moth wings. Holding a hand to the eye and rounding the fingers, the speaker of “Lost Alphabet” acts as the writer acts: narrowing focus, targeting detail.
I want nothing to end, not a single observation,
despite longing for what remains unknown. For one thing:
weight. Another: ratio. Flight’s beat, beat, glide. And
constantly, the interruption: sometimes circling for days, a
wary insistent stray.
In her new poems, myriad voices extend Olstein’s investigation. Mentions of medical experiments appear beside anecdotes of space travel. Reflection is compelled by fact, doubt undergirds perception.
Either the mute child spoke
in full sentences alone in the dark
or the monitors picked up ghosts
of deliverymen and pelicans
streaming over the bridge.
Thus Olstein asks us to consider knowledge as ephemeral, relational. She critiques certainty, exposes fact. These are important poems. They walk us to the borderline of what we take for granted and stand unflinching at the chasm, compelling us to wonder what it’s possible to know.
~Carlin M. Wragg, Editor, Open Loop Press
Slowly, the absence of pain arrives like
snow falling. It was on a day like this when, visiting, Ilya
decided to stay. At least, never left. It is customary here to
accompany the wounded. Whoever is able, and near.
Each poem is an illustrated plate colored by detail — the work of writer as collector. We learn that Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” brushes against the atmosphere of Marco Polo’s travel diaries, that Olstein was captivated by a landscape of moth wings. Holding a hand to the eye and rounding the fingers, the speaker of “Lost Alphabet” acts as the writer acts: narrowing focus, targeting detail.
I want nothing to end, not a single observation,
despite longing for what remains unknown. For one thing:
weight. Another: ratio. Flight’s beat, beat, glide. And
constantly, the interruption: sometimes circling for days, a
wary insistent stray.
In her new poems, myriad voices extend Olstein’s investigation. Mentions of medical experiments appear beside anecdotes of space travel. Reflection is compelled by fact, doubt undergirds perception.
Either the mute child spoke
in full sentences alone in the dark
or the monitors picked up ghosts
of deliverymen and pelicans
streaming over the bridge.
Thus Olstein asks us to consider knowledge as ephemeral, relational. She critiques certainty, exposes fact. These are important poems. They walk us to the borderline of what we take for granted and stand unflinching at the chasm, compelling us to wonder what it’s possible to know.
~Carlin M. Wragg, Editor, Open Loop Press
July 9, 2012
The best narrative of persona poems I've encountered so far. It's written from the perspective of a lepidopterist (someone who studies moths), and is so personal and beautiful that I felt like I was in the hut with the narrator, recording every minute details of the insects' wings.
June 8, 2016
“What discovery will lead me from who I am? If I could wake as a blank field, a cloud-covered plain, wind in the place of each memory, what would I choose?”-[each river was a river of mercury]
October 31, 2010
Oh, my.
I wandered through the marvel that is Portland Powell's Blue Room poetry section (rows & rows; shelves & shelves), curious to see what contemporary women writers had "staff recommendation" notes applied to their books.
Not many. Even for Powells. Harumph.
But there is Lisa Olstein -- and I am thrilled that I purchased this Copper Canyon book, a prose poetry collection. Still in the middle of it, but here is one taste (at Verse Daily): http://www.versedaily.org/2009/aboutl... and a selection of other poems at Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archi... .
I wandered through the marvel that is Portland Powell's Blue Room poetry section (rows & rows; shelves & shelves), curious to see what contemporary women writers had "staff recommendation" notes applied to their books.
Not many. Even for Powells. Harumph.
But there is Lisa Olstein -- and I am thrilled that I purchased this Copper Canyon book, a prose poetry collection. Still in the middle of it, but here is one taste (at Verse Daily): http://www.versedaily.org/2009/aboutl... and a selection of other poems at Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archi... .
November 3, 2010
from Lost Alphabet by Lisa Olstein:
(Reviewer's Note: Please imagine this as block text...)
[some superior heaven]
Small crowds in the distance. It is the same for emergency as
for celebration: clots of bodies gathering and dispersing. A
boy lies dead in a field. I don't know what killed him. I know
his face, his habit of walking. We never spoke, but this was
not unfriendly. He was found and his family was brought.
One by one they move into the field and lie beside him. He
will never enter their home again.
(Reviewer's Note: Please imagine this as block text...)
[some superior heaven]
Small crowds in the distance. It is the same for emergency as
for celebration: clots of bodies gathering and dispersing. A
boy lies dead in a field. I don't know what killed him. I know
his face, his habit of walking. We never spoke, but this was
not unfriendly. He was found and his family was brought.
One by one they move into the field and lie beside him. He
will never enter their home again.
April 17, 2011
Lovely! I am still intrigued by the character Ilya, who wasn't even the main one. Definitely will read more by this poet.
February 6, 2011
More please!
Achey and opaque.
The fragility of moths (and life and self) given in delicate paragraphs.
What a tiny perch, but with it I felt like I was flying in this hut.
Achey and opaque.
The fragility of moths (and life and self) given in delicate paragraphs.
What a tiny perch, but with it I felt like I was flying in this hut.
January 1, 2022
A collection of diary entry, or perhaps more accurately scientific log, style of prose poems, detailing the speaker's retreat to a village to study moths. The prose poems invoke gentleness, life and death, pain and what causes it, and radical empathy. At times, the book feels like an extended metaphor for the relationship between the speaker and Ilya, the collection's only other recurring human figure, and at other times an exercise in dailyness and wonder. This is a quiet, moving, and convincing book, and it was a pleasure to read.
Read
August 23, 2019"Am I meant simply to observe, to record? How will I know
when this work is done? There are things to which I mean
to be true. I'm no longer sure what they are, but I recognize
falsity's tin ring. I search and it finds me. I move, it moves,
too. What discovery will lead me from who I am?"
when this work is done? There are things to which I mean
to be true. I'm no longer sure what they are, but I recognize
falsity's tin ring. I search and it finds me. I move, it moves,
too. What discovery will lead me from who I am?"
November 29, 2020
Poetry isn’t really my thing, but this was interesting and atmospheric and definitely tells a story.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews