How Many More of Them Are You? - Softcover

Lubasch, Lisa

9781880713198: How Many More of Them Are You?

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880713195 ISBN 13: 9781880713198

Publisher: Avec Books, 1999

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Poetry. "HOW MANY MORE OF THEM ARE YOU is quizzical. It is riveted to paradox. It is philosophically sophisticated. It is a brilliant and thrilling book"—Lyn Hejinian. "In these audacious but subtle writings, which often take on the aphoristic and fragmentary character of notes, Lisa Lubasch addresses the material worlds of love, language, and knowledge. As she searches out new shapes and a new pace for poetry to operate within, she's also stretching outward, extending the territory of what can be thought, felt, and said—and changing the value of the fragment, too, making it something whole in itself, creating wholeness in midair"—Cole Swensen.

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From Publishers Weekly

"Affronte tes maladies. Il faut les embracer." A poet in her mid-20s, Lubasch writes with the intensity of a witness to the "birth of consciousness" in the classic late-19th-century sense. And, indeed, of the many echoes that resound in her debut volume, those of the most angst-ridden, defiant and uber-menschlich Europeans--Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Lautreamont, the ironist Laforgue--are the most apparent. The book is broken into six sections of short verse-sentences, each of which is a poem augmented by lengthier "Notes" and "Leprosarium" (these last comprise perhaps 80% of the work). Mostly apostrophic, with direct addresses to the reader, a lover or the powers that be, the poems approach being and consciousness with the irony-shucking fury of a new Promethean: "O vile and sophisticated burglars of the night. These are all my incantations!/ Of the sun that searches out its prey, then buries it, I say 'Deceptive sunlight! Implacable sidewalk! (Barren amour).' " The effective use of white space and asterisks between such pronouncements and quieter, more meditative verse put Lubasch at a productive crossroads, one where the integrity of the fragment, and the continuities of lyric are simultaneously questioned. The result is a poetic identity shaken of its philosophical surety, and collapsed into a mundane, spiritually barren, visceral (read: erotic) existence, which counters all easy idealism ("the neat blue hills"). But the speaker, despite all the trepidation, seems desperate for real connection, and still believes it possible--"spur-winged, wagging, wagged/ into these words// poured out in rains, acred// urgings toward vergency." It's a fraught ride that Lubasch provides, and one looks forward to what her future, already foretold as a minefield of possibilities, holds. (Oct.)
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From Kirkus Reviews

Lubasch offers us a book of texts and sub-texts in six parts, proving thereby that the spirit of the avant-garde isnt dead or dormant but just lost and inarticulate. The radical subjectivism that inspired Antonin Artaud and the surrealists to abandon the pretense of communication between author and audience seems to have been part of Lubaschs inspiration to compile an apparently random and meaningless collection of interior thoughts (I am not the sole transcriber of my lonelinesses and weird images (the hand, mutating fingers, angle of entrance 33 degrees / and one long torpor of) into a highly opaque work whose nature is as obscure as its meaning. Unfortunately for the poetand her readersits far too late in the day for such an approach to induce the shock of unfamiliarity, since literary deconstruction of this kind has been a standard in experimentation (often enough undergraduate) for at least half a century. As hard as it clearly would be to trace a thread of coherence through what is obviously intended as a celebration of the anti-rational, it would be harder still to understand exactly how Lubasch grew to be convinced that there is still an audience for such conceits. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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