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. She lives in Charlottesville.
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 poetry of Lisa Russ Spaar:
“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
Persea Books
