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Less Obvious Gods
Reviews:
"In Lisa Coffman’s provocative odes – to 'Time', 'Pain', 'Cold', 'Secrets', 'Balance', 'The Comma', 'The Past Tense', 'The Kiss', 'The Tick', 'The Ass' – abstractions become entities, relatable, influential, surprising: our 'Less Obvious Gods'. For Coffman, experience folds back on itself, change perpetually remakes us, and consciousness is always self-consciousness, complicating our every desire with rueful awareness: 'what the wave does below the wave.' In 'Kiss', she evokes 'your tongue loosing words off what they cover,' and that stripping off of self-deception, that recognition of our dangerous freedom to swim – or not – in passion’s undertow, makes Less Obvious Gods a theogony for our equivocal times."
~ Nathalie F. Anderson
"Lingering, meticulous, breathless, aglow, Less Obvious Gods showcases Lisa Coffman's superb ear, and her mind and eye attuned to both joy and loss. The pour and spill of her lyric can barely contain -- in her own words -- 'the honest messy nature/of when inner is brought forth to outer.' Coffman is wonderfully, quirkily attentive to big things revealed in small moments. It has been well worth the wait for her second book."
~ Daisy Fried
These are poems dazzling in their grace, sharpness, depth, and the joy of surprising truths surfacing on page after page. Coffman has an ear for American music, an eye for precise detail, a striking intelligence, a heart that pulses wildly, and an understanding of silence, of what’s not said. Love and sex, family, bulls and cows, dogs, time, pain, “a little oar into the underworld”—oh, I can’t tell you how jubilant I feel reading Less Obvious Gods, how completely satisfying it is.
~ Alicia Ostriker
"Less Obvious Gods has attitude a-plenty, and is refreshingly unguarded and transgressive in its approach to both tone and subject matter -- which is as often as not an almost-Tantric refusal to distinguish between the erotic and the devotional. The author has an unmistakable voice, one that is querulous, unflappable and hip without being fashionably wise-ass. Lisa Coffman is a writer of considerable promise."
~ David Wojahn
Links to more reviews:
Amazon
The New Times
ForPoetry
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$15 (includes shipping) |
Likely
Reviews:
"Lisa Coffman is a major poet in the making. Imagine a voice that combines heart-of-America brooding like Jame’s Wright’s with a shaded elegance like Elizabeth Bishop’s. Imagine Whitman’s spirit somewhere in the vicinity. Imagine a love of small towns ringed by mountains, a shrewd ear for lonely folks’ dialog, and a music that seems to pour out of your own life as you read these poems. Likely is a book brimming with surprise and beauty: some of the poems – 'Rapture','The Products of Hog', 'Graveyard' – left me breathless."
~ Alicia Ostriker
Links to more reviews:
Publisher's Weekly
Environmental Press