Madrigalia
Lisa Russ Spaar

This career-spanning volume portrays in stunning fashion Lisa Russ Spaar’s exquisite obsessions: spiritual hunger, lingual pleasures, bodily decay. The “ringleader of a stunning lexicon” (Shenandoah), Spaar’s poems are both colloquial and sumptuous, hyper-attuned to contemporary idiom while rooted in language’s primordial, earthy roots. Whether writing of the erotic or the divine, of anorexia or insomnia, of fairy tale or literary history, Spaar’s writing is unmistakably her own, a trove of music and magic like nothing else in contemporary poetry. In Madrigalia, her oeuvre is on full display; it is a showcase of her indispensable poetic gifts, a tribute to a writer both ascetic and ecstatic.

“Lisa Russ Spaar sounds like no other poet writing today.”
—Jennifer Chang, The Believer

“Madrigalia features a riveting suite of new poems that need to be read aloud and savored to fully experience the unexpected twists, virtuoso lexicon, and erotic charge.”
—Arthur Sze

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Orexia, Blue Venus, Satin Cash, and Vanitus, Rough. She is the editor of More Truly and More Strange, among other anthologies. She is Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where for man years she directed the MFA program in creative writing.

Paperback / $19.95 (Can $25.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-536-9 / 168 pages / Poetry