Orexia: Poems

by Lisa Russ Spaar

In sensual new poems, Lisa Russ Spaar explores the physical and spiritual desires of late-middle age, showcasing as she does so her magical capacity to entwine the colloquial and baroque, the explicit and the ethereal. Thrumming with the triune hungers of mind, mouth, and spirit, Lisa Russ Spaar’s fifth book plumbs daily life in order to transcend it, discovering and embodying the sacred and erogenous as it does so. Seductive and symphonic, Orexia is the latest glory by the “ringleader of a stunning lexicon” ( Shenandoah ).

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2018

About the author

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008), Vanitas, Rough (Persea, 2012), and Orexia (Persea, 2017). She is the editor of Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson, Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems, and All that Mighty Heart: London Poems. A collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, was published by Drunken Boat Media in 2013. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, an All University Teaching Award, an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and the 2013-2014 Faculty Award of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Poetry, Boston Review, Blackbird, IMAGE, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Slate, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals and quarterlies, and her commentaries and columns about poetry appear regularly or are forthcoming in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She was short-listed for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing, and has taught at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Seattle Pacific University, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. --Poetry Foundation

Reviews

[Casey (ish-i-ness) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The front flap says the collection “plumbs the conditions of late middle age, weaving together… the mortal and the fertile”. That perspective is the strength of this collection. It’s refreshing to have a work that unapologetically explores mature femininity, especially in terms of the natural world. I didn’t find any one poem that attracted me, and in the end I’m not sure I enjoy the individual poems, but I appreciate the collection as a whole and am glad it was published, rather than, as likely many such writings have in the past, languishing in a drawer, unseen.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about the body, mind, spirit, aging, and longing.

from Celibacy 1: "Unmarried, the heart ejaculates / what it must, scarlet-purled, arterial, // away, away. Or conversely, married, / it requires all—venous, freighted with waste. // Fuck the heart."

from Mynddaeg Hour: "In another kind of tale, / a glass shoe might drift in your hand, // a future, on bent knee."

from Orexic Hour: "Who cares that the maples blistered // with renewal today, at last, / despite shackles of snow, // not for me, not for you, / obeying an instinct akin to human, // but not."

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lisa Russ Spaar's Orexia is an astonishing collection. Alternately awestruck, mordant, probing, and elegiac, and always imaginative, each poem is a marvel of musicality and concinnity.

[Bonnie Fournier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another author, I read suggested this book. I do not do well with poetry. I rarely understand it. But I actually got some of this. May be because I am an aging, mature woman.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not great. The poems felt constrained, limited.

[Shelley · Rating 1 out of 5]

tedious, dense, impenetrable. these poems are wound so tightly they strangle themselves.