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Lisa Samuels

Lisa Samuels teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the

author of Letters (Meow, 1996), The Seven Voices (O Books,1998), War Holdings (Pavement Saw, 2004) as well as the editor of an annotated reprint of Laura Riding's Anarchism Is Not Enough (University of California, 2001). She has recent poems and essays in Denver Quarterly, Aufgabe, Delmar, New Literary History, and elsewhere. She is also known for her work on modernist and contemporary writers, on intellectual property in the humanities, and on critical practices. Her new book of poetry, Paradise for Everyone, has just been published by Shearsman Books.

"The wonderful poems in Lisa Samuels's Paradise for Everyone have about them the alertness and vivacity that belong to the world of the newly discovered (and the newly discovering). It is Samuels's great gift that she can find realities anew at every phrase, and her own position among them curious. She examines distinctions—the features that make things different. She makes certain (however briefly) that what she cares about still exists. She reminds us, her readers, that anything that can recur is amazing. This is a deeply intelligent and lovely book—a book of encounters that may also serve as a manual for encountering."

- Lyn Hejinian

The blue sky above

Lisa Samuels

Civility is a monster that has swallowed me up
and munches on the middle with a difference

it wants to make the moon swell with continuance
the girls smiling, roads flat and meaningful—

The skies are roads, meaningful, the portion for
bodies tucked—your sweet face harboring

what we have to do and sorrow feet
like roads—hands that turn from each other—
pieces of the body bowled and nothing functional

I think you are an archer lurching through
the air, convincingly I don't exist

earth-tempered, water-tempered, something
substantial appeared and I went toward it
guiltily pronouncing my unrepair—

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