Inner Coast (excerpt)

Lisa Olstein

Text of page one of the excerpt from "Inner Coast" : "Nature has her culminating hours / Notwithstanding the beauty of / a moonlight row, you must choose a / dark night, when the motion of / your boat sets the sea on fire / around you Now dip the net / and as the air rushes out / the water rushes in, and / our dirty, torn old net is sud- / denly turned to a web of gold / just the animal you want / when the clouds are so / thick that water, sky, and land / become one indiscriminate mass / of black, and one seems to be / rocking above a volcano / very different, when seen from / the deck of a vessel, from its / appearance as one floats / through its midst" The text is pasted on an aged piece of paper beside a scientific illustration titled "Fig. 151"Text of page two of the excerpt from "Inner Coast" : "it is a curious fact / your oar as you lift it / its effect / see / the sea has / tiny lamps / little shining spheres / a long undulating wave / that dim spreading halo / the little creature you are trying to catch" The text is pasted onto a white background beside two scientific illustrations titled "fig. 52" Text of page three of the excerpt from "Inner Coast" : "It is not strange that the true nature of this remained / unexplained for the soft parts of the body are so shy / of approach it is not easy to examine the living" The text is pasted above a white background and below a scientific illustration titled "Fig. 166"Text of page four of the excerpt from "Inner Coast" : "The same is true of any stony beach or / rocky shore / of / great rivers haunted / of the woods / of elms, / walnuts, beeches, birches, maples, / birds / buffaloes, bears, wolves, foxes, deer" The text is pasted onto a white background. Two scientific illustrations titled "Fig. 92" and "Fig. 93" are pasted in the middle of the poem.Text from page five of the excerpt from "Inner Coast": "How far? how wide / ? at will or" The text is pasted onto a white background. A scientific illustration titled "Fig. 127" is pasted in the middle of the page.

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Color image of Lisa Olstein sitting on a wooden chair in a creek.
Photo:
Anja Schütz

Lisa Olstein is the author of six poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone; Lost Alphabet; Little Stranger; Late Empire; Dream Apartment; and Distinguished Office of Echoes. Her nonfiction includes Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press/Dreamscape/Hanser), a book-length lyric essay on the intersection of pain, perception, and language; and Climate (Essay Press), an exchange of epistolary essays co-written with poet Julie Carr. Olstein is the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite, fronted by songwriter Jeffrey Foucault, and in 2025 Lost Alphabet for voice, five musicians, and electronics, an adaptation of her poems by composer Januibe Tejera, premiered with Ensemble Phace (Vienna). Olstein’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Writing Residency, Hayden Carruth Award, Writers League of Texas Discovery Book Award, and Sustainable Arts Foundation Award. She is the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin.

Color cover image of "Distinguished Office of Echoes" by Lisa Olstein. Features an illustration of the insides of a human body.

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Distinguished Office of Echoes
Copper Canyon Press

Port Townsend, Washington

  • Featured book

A collection of three collage-, cutout, and erasure-based poems, Distinguished Office of Echoes leans into the intersection of word and image, exploring the revelatory language they make together. Each sequence uses an antique reference book as its source text: an 1865 study of marine invertebrates becomes an exploration of physical death and the disorientation of sudden loss; an 1865 proto-medical textbook journeys into the eerie dislocations of illness; and a 1905 primer on ancient Greek history investigates human and geologic time, time of war versus the time of rivers. Olstein brings a combination of reverence and irreverence, wit and tenderness to these archival texts—their taxonomies and lexicons, assumptions and elisions—casting a feminist gaze on outdated histories while discovering new intimacies in their midst. Charged with the magnetic pull of material fascination, each poem enters into and reinvents the realm of its source, undertaking a practice of excavation, collaboration, and transformation to reimagine the field of the page while reconsidering what it means to examine and to be examined.

“We think we know what erasure and collage can do, and then someone makes something that says, Yes, and also—: This is a book comprised of 3 real poems and a process essay and it is wonderful and elegant and strange and fulfilled.”
—Dana Levin

“The music of Olstein’s poems is as cerebral as it is sonic. Playing repetition and expectation against its inner tensions, she bends perspective more skillfully than any other contemporary poet.”
—Alina Stefanescu

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