Late Empire

by Lisa Olstein

“This timely yet elemental collection unfolds where the exigencies and distractions of daily life brush up against the political, the ethical, and the existential.” ― Publishers Weekly “Olstein here meditates on a world gone awry, limning in precise, beautifully modulated language both personal dislocation and the slings and arrows visited upon the community at large.” ― Library Journal > “Brilliant and provocative.” ― The Literary Review “In Late Empire, the poet throws herself into a disturbing discussion about 21st-century realities, pinpointing, questioning, and exhorting. It’s a riveting picture of the micro, day-to-day busy-ness against the macro, overshadowing struggle of existential survival.” ― Rain Taxi > In her fourth book―a gorgeous call-to-arms in the face of our current social and political conditions―Lisa Olstein employs her signature wit, wordplay, candor, and absurdity in poems that are her most personal―and political―to date. Like a brilliant dinner conversation that ranges from animated discussions of politics, philosophy, and religion to intimate considerations of motherhood, friendship, and eros, Olstein’s voice is immediately approachable yet uncomfortably at home in the American empire. Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections and a book-length lyric essay. She is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin where she teaches in the Michener Center for Writers and New Writers Project MFA programs.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2017

About the author

Lisa 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.

Reviews

[Kendrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Late Empire is, I imagine, a difficult work to get into without a firm grounding in poetry. It is abstract, in the sense that it does not seek to reproduce the world as the poet sees it. Lisa Olstein, a poetry lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, is more concerned with the disorder and absurdity of life. While many of her poems are beautiful, they are driven by image and sound. They disobey narrative syntax, because they are suspicious of the logic that narrative provides.

The poem “The Disaster” is a good example. Olstein takes aim at the way disaster has become a totalizing force in news reporting and journalism. She repeats the word disaster and situates it in varying positions – as an event (“The disaster ruins everything”), an actor (“The disaster exposes us”), an abstract force (“The disaster is perhaps related to forgetfulness”). The repetition of disaster numbs, but its appearance in different contexts makes its presence pervasive. Disaster, Olstein is suggesting, is a force that orders the world on a subconscious level. Only by refusing its framework, by surfacing it through sound and image, we are able to apprehend its invisible nature. This work on the level of the word and sentence is admirable.

Olstein’s perspective and method of defying narrative via syntax is delightful. She is most interesting when she lends this to a greater project, as with her sequence of poems on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. Making use of its common symbols – shells, attics, houses, nests – Olstein pushes at the boundaries of Bachelard’s theory of private, oneiric spaces. “If we return to the old house as to a nest, / it is because memories are dreams. // In order to make so gentle a comparison, / one must have lost the house that stood / for happiness. Values alter facts.” Olstein is right – values do alter our perception. Not just private values but social, societal ones. This opens Olstein’s work to a consideration of wider political values, and how that impacts the self.

Syntax play is a distinct branch of poetry, and few do it as well as Olstein. But it is a narrow field, and hard to appreciate over a collection. Olstein attempts to surmount this by sectioning her work into various forms like sonnets, prose poems, and tercets, but even then I felt weariness. In Late Empire, Olstein stands against an American impulse to narrativize meaning out of everyday life, and so opens up space to feature the environmental crisis, healthcare inequity, and even war. While it does so with enjoyable wit, more often than not, I found that Olstein’s poems read as expressions of individual subjectivity, sustained solely on their surprising swerves. Her poems glitter beautifully enough for me. But I can see why it isn’t everyone’s favourite.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems read like linguistic exercises in postmodernism: syntactically gymnastic, semantically self-contained, paradoxically intellectual, and loosely thematic sound bytes marked by dark humor. Some poems are self-referential to the point of being solipsistic, pointing to a post-pandemic poetics before it became a phenomenon. Language is often stretched to the limits of meaning insofar as the meaning of a word is not a static thing in the world of each poem or even an idea in the mind of an ideal reader but rather a range of contrasts and differences of meanings—denotative, connotative, suggestive, and otherwise—within any given line or poem and the collection as a whole. How deftly the poet has managed to describe/imagine the disintegration of late-empire consciousness!

Favorite Poems:
“This Is America America Here Is Your Son”
“Arrangements”
“Possibility of Repair”
“Wrong Question”
“Space Race”
“A Simple Lesson on the Buried Spirit”
“3. A Theorem of Infinite Space”
“Your Country Needs You”
“Blue Stragglers”
“Cinders Of”

[Sarah DiViasmeni · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps it is just not my style, because I can appreciate the time and skill that not only goes into writing a book of poetry, but also the selection process of the editors and publishers too. Many of these poems were published in other journals, so add another layer of eyes and opinions and expertise.

That being said, the poems were filled with cliche adages, self-congratulating rhymes, the syntax that was lauded on the back cover felt childishly weird, and then she brought Godzilla into it. I know that this book was supposed to poke fun at dread, but I cannot help but feel that this is a book of poems that purposefully takes the reader nowhere, and laughs about it. I didn’t particularly feel invited to this table, and no matter how much I think a poet should not have to change themselves for the reader, a poem is only as alive as the reader can make it. This book is missing that tender element, it awakened nothing in me, maybe you’ll have a different experience.

[Maureen Alsop · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of Lisa Olstein, Late Empire, conceptually alludes to the Roman Empire’s historic endpoint; between the political reality of American demise and scientific aspiration, Olstein’s poetry projects a beam of light. Her lyrics flip the switch between reality and imaginable theory and expose societal under-patterns. By pinning together pensive propositions and personal observations, she establishes anticipatory discourse beyond convention. She states “Language in danger utters words that are dangerous... ” Read full review here: https://poemeleon.me/review-late-empi...

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some lovely, and achingly timely poems here that push the reader to observe with a crystalline clarity. Lisa Olstein's verse is immersive and surreal. I found myself re-reading passages again and again while reading this book.

[Michele · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really left in the dark with this one - I don't feel qualified to leave a review, because I was never quite sure what the pieces were about. Maybe someone else will get more out of this. As it stands, I can't really recommend it.

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure what these poems are about; seemingly random words glued together. No beat, no rhythm, no meaning that I can construe.

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

It's hard to say why these poems didn't quite work for me, but most of them did not. Plenty of individual lines and moments to admire at least. I just wanted a little more clarity.

[Orca · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Often when we think we are describing, we merely imagine.”