Wild Dialectics

Poetry. This poetry unhinges the sensible cultural body and activates other oscillations of the sensible, which chime with acts of love and political subjects resuturing what are given to be facts. The poems are verbal machineries of encounter, brain music in relational life.

"Lisa Samuels's WILD DIALECTICS forges imaginary rhythms into speculative anthems. These lyrics of elusive logos ghost provisional conditions of enduring transience. With stunning poise, Samuels holds out for holding on to the inherent insistence of words' translucent pilgrimage."—Charles Bernstein

Lisa Samuels grew up in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. Her first poetry book THE SEVEN VOICES (O Books, 1998) emerged alongside her PhD dissertation (Virginia 1997), a study of modernist poetry and critical practice. She has also published five poetry books with Shearsman; a letterpress book of poems and drawings, Mama Mortality Corridos (Holloway, 2010); several poetry chapbooks; a childhood memoir, ANTI M (Chax Press, 2013); and an experimental novel, Tender Girl (Dusie, 2015). Her soundwork includes a 2-CD version of her book TOMORROWLAND (Shearsman, 2009), now being made into a film by director Wes Tank, and her writing has inspired musical scores by composer Frédéric Pattar and others. Her essays focus on transculturalism, genre, identity and the body, the digitas, and imagining what we don't know, and her editing work includes A TRANSPACIFIC POETICS, co- edited with Sawako Nakayasu from Litmus Press. In 2006 she moved from the U.S. to Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she teaches writing, literature, and theory and lives with her family in Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland.