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Orexia

Thrumming with the triune hungers of mind, body, and spirit, Lisa Russ Spaar’s fifth collection plumbs the conditions of late-middle age, weaving together (as only Spaar can) the sacred and the erogenous, the ethereal and the earthy, the mortal and the fertile. “Tomb, womb, / let’s not forget what we are,” she writes, and never does,
continuing: “Bitten moon. Perfect. What’s to come.” As ever, Spaar’s poetry is both transcript and epicenter of longing. Seductive and symphonic, Orexia is the latest glory by a poet of exquisite powers.

Praise for the Book

“These sinuous, come-hither poems explore aging and its inevitable vulnerabilities with gorgeous and exhilarating honesty. Orexia is a consolation and an astonishment.”—Tracy K. Smith

“Orexia is erotic the way syntax can be erotic, the way delay can be erotic, the way thought can be erotic. Lisa Russ Spaar uses language as if each word has specific weight and property, which when mixed together might either sing or explode.”—Nick Flynn

"Award-winning poet Spaar follows up her darkly sparkling Vanitas, Rough with another example of her intent, luscious writing."—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

"A collection that is palpable with hunger for the physical. . . . Spaar searches for that which eats at us and makes us yearn"—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of seven books of poetry and a collection of
essays, and the editor of the three poetry anthologies. For her commentary and
columns on poetry, which appear regularly in The Chronicle of Higher
Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles
Review of Books, she was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Circle Critics
Award for Excellence in Reviewing. Other honors include a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry,
and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. She is currently Horace W.
Goldsmith NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Virginia,
where she is Professor of English and Creative Writing.

Hardcover / $25.95 (Can $33.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-477-5 / 96 pages / Poetry