Agnes & Sally | Touch of the Whip | Avenue of Escape | Ted’s Favorite Skirt | Debtor’s Prison
The Corset | The Origin of the World | Methods of Birth Control | The Angel Hair Anthology
Inseparable

Inseparable
"If you add one word to another," Lewis Warsh writes, "it's going to all make sense,
eventually." Much sense is made and pleasure given by a poet who has remained
steady melancholy, bemused and musical for many decades. I was especially moved
by the poem about picking up the children from school. We are both ghost and
matter now, everywhere we go."
Fanny Howe

"Gently insistent rhythms and startling line breaks work in counterpoint throughout
these poems, knocking the tender up against the harsh as they wind through their
own labyrinth, constantly encountering the political quotidian shot through with
memories, observations, and lyric detours. Always agile, always unexpected, Lewis
Warsh's poems exemplify what good poetry must do- wander from the prescribed
path and find its own way through the newly-unrecognizable world."
Cole Swensen

"Lewis Warsh stars as the hard-boild detective on the trail of something ever-elusive
but so distinct you can taste it (the words force themselves out of your own mouth).
The camera careens woozily across the obliterated line of the grand narrative, as
Warsh delivers breathless internal polyphonies with the bullet-speed of Bogart and
Bacall, the balancing act of a Buster Keaton, Thomas Bernhard's tell-it-like-it-is
indictment and Sandra Bernhardt's audacious grace. These poems, crackling with
phantom rhymes and rhythms hidden just below the sentence-surface, become more
than poems, the way "ideas are acts of love." Warsh imperatives ("Tell me something
you never told anyone") and admissions ("no one answerable except me") are such
acts. He leads us confidently, and confidentially, in an unspoken agreement to feel
as much as we can stand without breaking into pieces. "who can sleep?"
Matvei Yankelevich