One Big Time
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Wave Books
Publishing:19th Jun '25
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 19th June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Lisa Fishman’s latest collection, One Big Time, is a stunning articulation of the author’s “journey-in-place” in the environs around a one-room cabin in Northeastern Ontario over a period of fourteen days in quarantine.
Here is the author at her most exacting and exploratory, in poems that hew with lyric precision to the immediate physical and geologic environment. At the same time, language is an alert, mobile life-form in active investigation of what one thinks one understands, and of where one thinks one is. While the poet quests daily for a passageway from one body of water into another, words live in other words (“the hemlock / is a he / today”), and acrostics are illuminations: s-w-i-m is “sleek widening instant’s magnet.” Surprised by joy, these biocentric poems offer a way of being in the world with wonder and rigor––attentive enough to be lost, unknowing enough to be changed.
Previous Praise
MAD WORLD, MAD KINGS, MAD COMPOSITION
Lisa Fishman’s Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition enacts an engaging statement of personal poetics offering up a kind of secular reliquary.
Patrick James Dunagan, Colorado Review
Poetry as interaction, as a way of being in the world, Fishman suggests, is also a way to sustain a life. The writing process, while ephemeral, nevertheless creates its own kind of cyclical order. Writing isn’t a way to extract truths. Rather, poetry as process creates a life through its ongoing interactions with the world.
Emily Barton Altman, Annulet
24 PAGES AND OTHER POEMS
This is a world in the midst of creation, an Ars Poetica of everything...
Publishers Weekly
Like Clare, Fishman can ramble; her friendly, loose-woven writing, with its lack of transitions, can feel like erasure. She also yearns “to hear past words of the self,” to bring other people’s voices into her poems—the people who wrote the books she read, and the human beings who share her rural Wisconsin life.
Stephen Burt, Boston Review
ISBN: 9798891060142
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
64 pages