Lisa Jarnot

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Biographical note:  Lisa Jarnot was born in Buffalo, New York in 1967. She is the author of several chapbooks as well as a full-length collection of poems, Some Other Kind of Mission, (Burning Deck Press, 1996). She currently lives in New York City and is completing a biography of the American poet Robert Duncan which will be published by the University of California Press in 2004.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710072
ISBN-10:  1844710076
ISBN-13:  9781844710072
Author:  Lisa Jarnot
Title:  Ring of Fire
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Oct-03
Extent:  108pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  162 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Ring of Fire is a book of experimental lyric poetry in the tradition of American Poetry beginning with Walt Whitman and continuing through the Beat Generation, the New York School, and contemporary Language Poetry. Jarnot’s work represents a synthesis of traditional modes of verse alongside more fragmented avant-garde writing practices. The poems in this collection resonate with homages to the metaphysical masters of the 17th Century while commenting on popular culture in the Western world.

Table of contents:
I. The Book of Providence
The Bridge
Dictionary
Tell Me Poem
Ode
Brooklyn Anchorage
What In Fire Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love?
Found Text
Autobiography
Still Life
Valley of the Shadow of the Dogs
The New Life
The Age of the Velocipede
II. Sea Lyrics
III. Dumb Duke Death
Dumb Duke Death
IV. Heliopolis
Suddenly, Last Summer
O Life Force of Supernalness of World
Ye White Antarctic Birds
Poem Beginning with a Line by Frank Lima
O Razorback Clams
Moo Is Om Backwards
Song of the Chinchilla
You, Armadillo
On the Lemur
Aardvark
Song from the Greek
Lake of Fire
The Song Between
Old
The Eightfold Path
Right View
Right Aspiration
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Energy
Right Mind
Right Labor
Right Meditation
The Specific Incendiaries of Springtime

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Excerpt from book:  

Brooklyn Anchorage

and at noon I will fall in love
and nothing will have meaning
except for the brownness of
the sky, and tradition, and water
and in the water off the railway
in New Haven all the lights
go on across the sun, and for
millennia those who kiss fall into
hospitals, riding trains, wearing
black shoes, pursued by those
they love, the Chinese in the armies
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash,
and in my plan to be myself
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life,
and I left, from an airport,
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train
started moving and yesterday
it seemed true that suddenly
inside of the newspaper
there was a powerline and
my heart stopped, and everything
leaned down from the sky to kill me
and now the cattails sing.

Review quote:  The remarkable poems in Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire seem to come to us out of some profound, yet distant, sadness. Rising on wave after wave of near endless iteration, like a linguistic Mandelbrot set, they arrive in the long moment after loss as the signature and enactment of an initiation – the primal collision and redemptive force of breathing between the tensile structure of the poem and the frangible space of living.

Patrick Pritchett
Jacket Magazine

Review quote:  Jarnot’s poems get me both in the head and in the gut. The “I” is key to the poetry’s power: it’s ecstatic. From the Greek for ‘to put out of place,’ the ecstatic self is driven out of itself. This is the simultaneous joy and terror of the work: From ‘Brooklyn Anchorage’: ‘I became someone else … everything/ reached down from the sky to kill me / and now the cattails sing.’ The Ring of Fire is both Dante’s suffering and the Johnny Cash song’s self burned away by passion.

Alison Cobb
Small Press Traffic