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STEM

STEM

$20.00Price

ISBN: 979-8-9865715-1-5

Pub Date: Sept. 2022

Pages: 88


By Lisa Allen Ortiz


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY 2021


Stem is a book about the body. The body, in this book, is imagined as a stem. The human body, rooted in seed, expands itself or is forced upward until at its higher end, another seed appears. Such is this book’s conception of body: seed, effort, some kind of mind and the experience therein. When we have a body we are said to be alive, but where inside the body—this book asks—does such aliveness reside, and what is it about that aliveness that we name it: mine.


“Beautiful manuscript of lyrical poems that surprise as much as they they tell the truth about one’s day, one’s life. There is honesty here that isn’t flat, doesn’t tractor over the reader, but uplifts one, helps to get through the day. This honesty isn’t in any way confessional, unless by confessional we mean a voice of an earthling sharing what it means to be alive on this planet here, today. This is a terrific book of poems.“

—Ilya Kaminsky, Final Judge for the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2021

    “Lisa Allen Ortiz’s Stem should come with a warning label. These poems might stick to your hair, get under your fingernails, slide under your ribs, infiltrate your comfort zone. They might stun you with the strangeness of being an animal called human, lure you into the eyes of trees, dismay you with evidence of your kinship with dirt and death. Ortiz deconstructs the ordinary syntax of language and life, and uses the bits to articulate the cries and murmurs of owls, grasses, flowers, streets, whale bones, and the body’s own wild desires and hungers. In this way, bypassing our deadening habit of making sense, and as in the fairy tale where the river reeds whisper who killed the child, these poems bring us unsettling news of the unbearable fragility of the world, of terrible secrets buried deep in childhood, or in our own viscera of longing and bewilderment at the shock of mortality. The warning label should read: You will never be the same after this book. You will enter a radical, gritty, gorgeous luminosity from which you will not recover.”\

    —Frances Hatfield, PhD, poetry editor for Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche; author of Rudiments of Flight: Poems


    Lisa Allen Ortiz is the author of Guide to the Exhibit, 2016 winner of the Perugia Press Prize, and she is the co-translator—with Sara Rivera—of the Peruvian poet Blanca Varela whose selected poems are collected in The Blinding Star, published by Tolsun Books in 2021.

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