Squeezed Light

Lissa Wol­sak

With the pub­li­ca­tion of this vol­ume, Lissa Wol­sak — who seem­ingly emerged as a fully-formed poet in the mid-1990s after var­i­ous other pur­suits — emerges for the first time once again. Her work is nei­ther eas­ily clas­si­fied, nor trace­able to a par­tic­u­lar school or lin­eage, but instead con­tin­u­ally cre­ates its own unim­peach­ably evanes­cent con­text, inde­pen­dent of thought out­side the work itself. “The mir­ror would do well to reflect fur­ther,” demands one of Jean Cocteau’s Orphic “radio” voices. Wolsak’s poetry more than sat­is­fies this strange demand, for the self-reflective moment in her work takes us far beyond fash­ion­able lit­er­ary recur­sion, find­ing again and again a gen­uinely mys­te­ri­ous inter­pen­e­tra­tion of aware­ness, lan­guage, and human care. Squeezed Light includes all of Wolsak’s pre­vi­ously pub­lished poetry to date, her poetic essay “An Heuris­tic Pro­lu­sion,” an inter­view with the author, and an Intro­duc­tion by George Quasha with Charles Stein.