The Way Out: Poems by Lisa Sewell - Softcover

Sewell, Lisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 188229517X ISBN 13: 9781882295173

Publisher: Alice James Books, 1998

Synopsis

The Way Out dares to enter the many underworlds of human exsistance: that of Persephone, that of Dante, and that of contemporary life. At once dark and affirmative, the poems move from personal observation to personal disclosure, never averting their gaze from the face they are seeing. Lisa Sewell is the unusual poet who uses the confessional mode in the service of reflecting fully, and with fidelity, the moment in which we now find ourselves. Her bodies, faces, temperaments, resemble our own, and these poems are a record of what it means to be human and American in the last years of the twentieth century.

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Review

"'We are hopelessly enclosed by the measure of our skins,' Lisa Sewell writes. The argument at the heart of this book is whether the body is a source of hopelessness or hope. 'I put my faith in the physical,' Sewell tells us, but she understands how belief necessitates doubt, only existing beside it. Focused and accomplished, this fine debut collection is a fierce and engaging quarrel with the fact of flesh." -- Mark Doty

"Lisa Sewell's poetry brings to mind Keats' phrase, 'thinking through the heart.' More than any young poet writing today, her work frames an urgency shot through with history as she builds a model of consciousness, original, strange. These poems enact a lyric muscle that explodes narrative, throws it wonderfully off track into new regions of feeling, thought, experience." -- Deborah Digges

"There's a terrible purity to the desolation from which many of these poems emerge. They emerge with unlacquered finality. Their gaze is pitiless. Cumulatively Sewell's poems possess great weight and power. In this ferocious book you will find the consolation of something seen deeply, the consolations of art." -- Frank Bidart

In A Biblical Landscape
The Announcement
The Art Of Survival
At The Heart Of The Season
Choke Cherries
Chorale
Circe, After His Departure
The Darkened Room
A Dedication
The Denied
Donor
Dream Of Winter
Empty Dish
Entry
Evolution
Expulsion
Forty Years
The Good Servant
Health
Human Nature
Inheritance
Love Poem
Messenger
The Miraculous
More Or Less
My Body In Japan
Numerology
One Of The Foolish Women
Ornithology
The Passion Of The Queen
The Quickening
Refuge
Release
Surrender
The Swimmer
Telling Them Apart
The Thief
Trompe L'oeil
Two Lessons In The Sacred: 1
Two Lessons In The Sacred: 2
The Way Out Of The Hospital
-- Table of Poems from Poem FinderŪ

About this edition

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 188229517X
• ISBN 13: 9781882295173
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80