Sign up to receive emails about events, readings, and other news.

Sign up to receive updates, exclusive information, and free classroom materials.

« Back to All Books

Vanitas, Rough

Lisa Russ Spaar

Available in December 2012!

With her trademark language—baroque yet colloquial, immediately recognizable but impossible to duplicate—Lisa Russ Spaar has written her most sumptuous and alluring poems to date, each one bursting with an appetite for the sensuous and the lingual. “Is syntax erotic?” she asks in in "Vanitas, Rough," the book's title poem. “If so, please. Please read. Here.”

Praise for the author:
“Spaar’s language has become more muscular, more erotic, and more insistently visceral. . . .[She] sounds like no other poet writing today.”—Jennifer Chang, The Believer

“An entrancing world of lush language and passionate imaginings.”—Publishers Weekly

“Spaar is ringleader of a stunning lexicon.”—Christopher Matthews, Shenandoah

"[Her poems] are the perfect marriage of the realism of William Carlos Williams . . . and the sleepless heaven-seeking of such cloistered ecstatics as Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manly Hopkins."—Virginia Quarterly Review

About the Author:
Lisa Russ Spaar is author of four acclaimed poetry collections and editor of several anthologies. Her recent honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and the Carole Weinstein Poetry Award. Spaar is Professor of English at the University of Virginia and poetry editor for The Chronicle of Higher Education Review. She lives in Charlottesville.

Also Available from Persea by the Author:
Satin Cash
Blue Venus

Original Trade Paperback/$15.95 (Can. $17.00)/ISBN 978-0-89255-420-1/72 pages/Poetry