Old Ways to Fold New Paper - Softcover

Lowitz, Leza

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0965330419 ISBN 13: 9780965330411

Publisher: Wandering Mind Books, 1997

Synopsis

Leza Lowitz's poems cross datelines, cultures and histories. With remarkable ease she combines moments of intense personal reflection and memory with insights into settings and events which have loomed over our century. These poems, placed in Key West, Chiapas, San Francisco, Berlin, Kyoto, Okinawa and Tokyo, are filled with unexpected gifts--the smell of rice cakes baking in tiny kitchens on the streets of Tokyo, a limbless toy soldier washed up on a beach in Okinawa, stones from a trout's belly piled "on the edge of the rough blue plate like a blessing in the rain." Lowitz's poems are like passionate letters from a traveler awake not only to what is around her but to the forces of nature and history which brought the present world to light.--Paul Bailiff, Creative Writing Department, San Francisco State University

About this title

Review:

A first collection by poet Leza Lowitz, the first book by a new publisher in Berkeley, and for both, an auspicious beginning. Most of these poems are set in foreign countries, especially in Japan where Lowitz was a journalist and a translator...Exotic places only intensify the daily tensions between delight and discomfort, belonging and exile...Yet in her poems there are moments, always, of a kind of stubborn transcendence. "Old Ways to Fold New Paper" is an edgy, profound and skillful witness to that cleft between how we wish things were, and how they truly are. -- Pacific Sun, April 1997

Leza Lowitz's first book of poems succeeds beautifully in linking a series of widely ranging poems with a sustained impulse, a persistent concern with the moral and ethical dimensions of what she examines....A distinguished debut, leading to pleasurable anticipation of new work from both author and publisher. -- San Francisco Review, "Debuts of the Year," January 1997

The freshness of these delicate, dense, sometimes mysterious, often political poems comes from the poet's extraordinary willingness to look. They are poems of perception--in all the senses of the word. Objective poetry. Yet at the same time, Lowitz's poetry is filled with stories that follow you like a persistent wound. Her poems haunt, stay with the mind, like the trough of history they cannot, will not, evade. Intelligent, edgy, these poems command attention. -- Jack Foley, "Cover to Cover," KPFA Radio, Berkeley

These poems plumb many depths of Japanese life and culture and the particular ways in which a foreigner intersects with these. This is a book which vibrates with an energetic curiosity, a book of searching questions. Whether the setting is familiar to exotic, Lowitz's desire to explore what is universal in human experience allows any reader to travel these rich territories, share in her discoveries, and perhaps experience revelations of his or her own. "Old Ways to Fold New Paper"will be the book I give as a special gift to anyone I know who is either moving to Japan or living here already -- The Japan Times, August 1997

About this edition

• Publisher: Wandering Mind Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0965330419
• ISBN 13: 9780965330411
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 98