The Room

by Joseph Lease

BRAND NEW softcover, clean text, solid binding, NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear / storage-wear; WE SHIP FAST. Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201601881 First books of poetry are sometimes marked by hesitancy and indirection; this one is not. Instead, Lease introduces a curiously powerful voice and establishes a singular style in work that ranges from stark syllabic poems reminiscent of the Black Mountain school, to others rich in surrealistic images, to discursive prose poems. Lease wields primal images to mirror a desolate subjective ``The lead sun. / Snow falling straight down / On graphite-colored water, / Yellow slick leaves, concrete.'' The evocative title poem, about the impending loss of a relationship, juxtaposes casual--even confessional--prose poems, formal quatrains, single-line stanzas, and images such as ``I have eight legs and an exoskeleton, / my eyes are livid taupe, and in each mandible I hold a tiny, scream / ing baby.'' Other prose poems capture the momentary blur between natural world and inner perception, as when ``my hands breathe new tightening inside the branch.'' Lease's voice weakens only when the sensual images become predictable--``I breathe like an oak tree / I taste your sweating skin''--or when overloaded images are more precious than precise. But Lease more often rewards readers by allowing them a memorable glimpse into the painful yet intelligible realm of loss and poetry itself. We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.) 3

Genres: Poetry

47 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011; Finalist, NCIBA Poetry Book of the Year Award), Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007), and Human Rights (Talisman House, second edition forthcoming). Lease’s poems “’Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” and "Send My Roots Rain" have been selected for Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was also selected for The Best American Poetry 2002.

Marjorie Perloff wrote: “The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies (“If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money”), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!”

Michael Bérubé called Broken World “remarkably inventive and evocative work from Joseph Lease, one of the finest poets writing today.”

Lease was born in Chicago, and attended Columbia University, Brown University, and Harvard University. He has received The Academy of American Poets Prize, The Henry Evans Fellowship in Poetry, and Fellowships and grants in poetry and poetics from Columbia University, Harvard University, Brown University, and California College of the Arts. He is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts and a member of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.