lie down too

by Lesle Lewis

This book is an intoxicating medicine garden where we learn to make connections through a myriad of small disjunctions, swallowing poems in doses like a set of morning pills. In lie down too , our journey is central, and the world—recast through the non sequitur of grief, through repetition and cycle—eventually allows all life to be born anew.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2011

About the author

Lesle Lewis' collections include Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011), and A Boot's a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014). Her chapbook, It's Rothko in Winter or Belgium was published by Factory Hollow Press in 2012. She has had poems appear in American Letters and Commentary, Northern New England Review, Hotel Amerika, Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street Mudfish, LIT, Pool, jubilat, notnostrums, and Sentence. She lives in New Hampshire and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Landmark College.

Reviews

[Laurel Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Woah, wait a minute, I grabbed this collection by sheer chance while perusing in the library, what luck! Lewis weaves poems that are alive, dense with promises you didn't think to ask about. I felt like I was reading little letters, full of little secrets between each line. I cannot say how much I love the format, how the language caught me off guard in the best ways. I will be seeking more from Lewis, I couldn't put this down.

[haley joy]

"We kiss farewell like a final goodbye./ We're the very last of the Love People./ Old love junk washes up in the mangroves" (48)

"Napping has since become our spiritual practice./ We sleep by the Connecticut./ How flat the water tries to be!/ The fog flowed with the water south./ I think it is good to leave civilization slowly (62).

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

"For protection against the ridiculous, we take suitcases full of books."

Narrative poetry told in fragments. Leaping fables. Jumps of love. This, like all of Lewis' books, is a book to hold closely for more than today.

[Literary Review The · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lesle Lewis
lie down too

(Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2011)

A beautiful, odd little book, in which poetic line has been superseded by the sentence: single sentences held apart from others or little cliques of sentences masquerading as paragraphs. Lewis’s sentences brush up against both white space and one another in a sort of supple ricochet of associative sense sometimes tied together by syntactic echoes, sometimes by reason, a gentle surrealism, or a soft wash of humor, as in my favorite, in which the narrator says her ideas “bike around the cemetery enough at night . . . They think they see goats there.” There’s a fascinating mind at work here.

—Renée Ashley
lie down tooThe Literary Review. "The Lives of Saints" Fall 2011

[Jacq Jardin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I keep insects.
You can have one of my bees.
I breathe for you, bake for you, weep for you.
I'm right-handed and I like my coffee on my right.
You're like drawing from memory.
You're a bunch of leather-backed nonsense I'm in for.
I am not yearning so badly which doesn't mean I don't love you so madly. "
(Lesle Lewis, My Sabbatical)