Lightsail

This arresting long-poem belongs to of a larger body of work by Lissa Wolsak of which LIGHTSAIL is the 7th aspect. Reintroducing Time, Perception, civilization's emotional plight, the coincidentia oppositorum, Beauty and its deformation. Witness subductions from an urgent inscape one might perceive if sitting on the ledge of Saturn's outermost ring, legs dangling, vision through a third eye returning the Mother's originary gaze as the uttermost radical creative force it is. Hope for insight and ethical imagination, this work is uncommonly dimensionally relentless.

A delicate structure of language is a nest, a hammock, a rope-bridge, a safety net, providing a partially elided view of the real, an oscillation between revelation and reveilment, illumination and occlusion, lightsail moves "beginninglessly" -world without end, in saecula saeculorum-at warpspeed and messing with our sense of scale, our self-orientation between intimate proximity and infinite distance-through our reading consciousness .. and where is our body? in the negative space between the words? the letters? the atoms? the planets? or in the light between us and those bodies? But yes, and yet, "we can speak/ face à face/ the two of us/ tremulous the/ manner of being." -Maria Damon

Poetry as transport. Lissa Wolsak's new book takes us sailing into & by means of a purifying light. An odd & awed journey, celestial & terrestrial, exploring & stating a geography that is perhaps the future home of consciousness. Statements, reports, questions arise in an enigmatic lyricism, at once archaic & futuristic. Welcome to what human being is becoming. -Hank Lazer, author of Thinking in Jewish (N20) and Evidence of Being Here: Beginning in Havana (N27) -