Vanitas, Rough
Lisa Russ Spaar

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.”

“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

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays, including Satin Cash, Blue Venus, and Orexia and the editor of three poetry anthologies. She was a 2014 Finalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award for Excellence in Reviewing. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-420-1 / 62 pages / Poetry