Landscapes I & II
Lesle Lewis
The whimsical, highly animated landscapes of Lesle Lewis’ second collection will surprise and delight. In confident prose poems, “Abstraction puts on her cowboy boots” and strides into the unknown. Employing collage reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s breathless dazzle, Lewis creates landscapes where surreal meets New England bucolic, meaning is arrived at cumulatively, and the animated and the “real” converse.
"This is a bar-raising kind of collection. In future reviews and poetry readings I may sign-off or leave the room immediately with a 'Feh! Not as good as Lewis.' "
—Stride Magazine
"Lewis gives us the something that is always other than the first touch. Something always lies beneath or above or beyond."
—The Keene Sentinel
"If you think a complete sentence expresses a complete thought, forget it. Lesle Lewis’s elegant sentences non-sequitur into uncanny compilations that are never done. We feel them going on, building beyond the page. Juxtaposing the rolling rhythms of prose with distinctly poetic content, Lewis has come up with another incisively intelligent, deeply generous collection—it’s a gift to contemporary poetry."
—Cole Swensen
"In their nervous eloquence, Lesle Lewis's surprising lines behave like brushstrokes that barely touch the page before lifting off again in the mind. Equal parts fable, modernist prose poem, philosophical investigation, and social geography, Landscapes I & II makes all these elements talk to each other through daring juxtaposition. The conversation is about the everyday workings of art and life, but its conclusions are always unpredictable. At once wildly expressionist and tightly structured, these poems delight with their agility and speed."
—Peter Gizzi
about the author
Lesle Lewis is also the author of Small Boat, which won the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in many journals including the following: Pleiades, American Letters and Commentary, Northern New England Review, Old Crow, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street, Mudfish, Slope, LIT, Sentence, and Pool. She teaches literature and writing at Landmark College in Vermont and lives in New Hampshire.
two poems from landscapes I & II
electronic press kit (pdf file)
