Books
The Unbeliever
Silent Treatment
"The eyes and voice here could easily be those of a fine fiction writer. Lisa Lewis has a secure touch with narrative, and a prodigal ease with details both gritty and lovely. The result is a collection of extraordinarily powerful poems.”—Henry Taylor, Brittingham Prize Citation
University of Wisconsin Press
"This is a wonderful book—severe, dark, uncompromising. The poetry is dense with sorrow and saturated with irony. There is a marvelous tension between the weighty cadences of these poems and their bristling, expansive portrayals of American culture. Silent Treatment is filled with the marvelous and indecorous, the romantic and the unruly, and with the panoramas of daily life which, until now, I had thought were no longer possible in American poetry."
—Lynn Emanuel
Penguin / National Poetry Series
Vivisect
Burned House with Swimming Pool
"Readers ... will be reminded of Walt Whitman by these sometimes prosaic, long-lined poems ... Though Lewis’ first book may place her among Whitman’s daughters, the hard-edged voice is all her own, and it does not falter as she considers the difficulties of female sexuality, gender, and human isolation ... Guided by her best gifts, ‘anger and strength and persistence,’ Lewis prevails.”
–Publishers Weekly
New Issues
"The longing in Lisa Lewis’ poems is real not only in the full narrative argument of her lines but in the mindful ambivalence she feels about her body—its sexuality, mortality, earth-transcendence. It is as if she were trying to write beauty into silence as well as finding her way from silence, and this is that poetry." –Stanley Plumly
Dream Horse Press
The Body Double
Taxonomy of the Missing
"Lisa Lewis’ fierce, unselfconscious poems are acutely honest, bristling with beauty, and terribly real. Calling out from the rural horse pastures and the blackness of the mind’s night, The Body Double is at once a tribute to the world’s roughness and bowing down to its mysterious power. In an eerily familiar voice that’s unflinching and precise, the poems here are both piercing and generous."
–Ada Limón
Georgetown Review Press
"In Taxonomy of the Missing, Lisa Lewis’ sixth collection of poetry, the past is present, finely-detailed and filtered, but never diminished, by the kind of tender regret that accrues only after decades of lived experience. 'I fought my miniature wars. Here are / my relics,' declares the speaker of one poem, offering the only thing wisdom’s good for: self-acceptance. Here beats the rhythm of 'an unconfounded, ordinary heart.'" – Leslie McGrath
The Word Works
Story Box
The Borrowing Days
Story Box was the winner of the 2008 Poetry Chapbook contest from Poetry West.
"These poems contain a sprawling, restless intelligence. They stream with music and brim over with the hopes and disappointments of the hidden heart. They are marked by bravery: unafraid to examine what is ugly and harsh, unafraid to range and ramble through time, myth, literature, landscape, and the many-chambered rivers of the mind. Alive with song, The Borrowing Days returns us to the sweep and plunge of what it means to live this life that is marked and bounded by death."
–Sarah Stickney
Emrys Press
Coming Soon: Present and Future Storm
forthcoming from The Word Works