Blue Venus
Lisa Russ Spaar

Lisa Russ Spaar explores the intimate relationship between the sensual and the sacred. Her nocturnal poems weave themselves into the very fabric of private fervor—lyric, sexual, spiritual—beginning with “Dusk” and continuing on until “Dawn.” Fierce and giving, Spaar's exquisite verse isolates essential moments of vulnerability and wonder. A series on insomnia—in the voices of some notable insomniacs—is among the most moving extended sequences in recent memory. Elsewhere, she traces poetry back to its primordial roots—prayer, lullaby, mourning, exaltation, propelled throughout by a resolute belief in the relationship between the human and the cosmic.

“A virtuoso book, ambitiously beautiful.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“[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

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

Lisa Russ Spaar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of four collections of poetry including Satin Cash, Orexia, and Vanitas, Rough. She lives in Charlottesville.

Paperback / $14.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-306-8 / 80 pages / Poetry