The Miraculous Recompense of Language: a conversation with Lisa Russ Spaar
Lisa Russ Spaar and I began an epistolary conversation in the spring of 2023 just before the publication of her first novel, Paradise Close. A longtime fan of Lisa and her poetry, I was very excited by this experiment with form and genre. The recent publication of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (in November, 2021) added to the significance of this moment in her career. I had interviewed Lisa after the publication of Orexia in 2019, and I was eager to discuss the development of her poetry and fiction that these two books represent.
About Paradise Close: In 1971, orphan Marlise Schade — 14, anorectic, and evicted from the psychiatric hospital her trust fund can no longer support — finds herself alone in an ancestral home during a blizzard. Marlise’s struggles to survive there become the focal point for a host of imperiled figures, living and dead, whose stories intersect with hers and with forces roiling the U.S. in the ’70s.
Decades later, 60-something Tee Handel is shaken by an inexplicable visitation. For years he’s nursed a deep hurt over his breakup with a captivating artist, spending his days and nights in solitude tinkering with antique clocks. What’s become of the artist, and how Tee reacts to his mysterious guest, testifies to the risk and inexorability of change. These two seemingly unrelated tales entwine to show how the wages of the past are always with us, as are the dangerous and redemptive consequences of secrets confided and withheld.
In this interview, we discuss the origins and evolution of her lyrical first novel, which was many years in the making, as well as the places and experiences that inspired its setting and characters. In her inimitable, profound way, she picks up on some of the themes she has spoken about so compellingly in earlier dialogs, especially the sacredness of creativity. We discuss the making of her new and selected collection in the second half of this conversation, dwelling on her intimate relationship to her words and her wisdom about how to deploy forms in a way that Denise Levertov would have recognized as organic.
— Jasmine V. Bailey
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Jasmine V. Bailey: Marlise, the protagonist of Paradise Close, is so richly, satisfyingly mysterious. We get to see her from her own perspective in the first section and later from a second perspective. This works because you obscure her identity for the reader until the final section. The effect of this is something like seeing yourself as others see you. Please talk about your choice to create this double experience of Marlise.
Lisa Russ Spaar: I wish I could say that I conceived of this “othering,” this mirroring of Marlise, deliberately or conceptually, especially since I’m very interested in the self and self-portrayal, and also in ecstasy (ex-stasis, a state of being “beside or outside the self”). The truth is that it happened, at first, unconsciously, organically. Nearly two decades ago, I started writing what is now Part Two — and it began as a story about a solitary, erstwhile poet, Tee Handel, who is nursing a long heartbreak and living largely in isolation in an old inherited house, an insomniac who tinkers around with broken antique clocks and whose world is upended by a mysterious visitation. Several years later, I began working on another prose piece — now Part One — that drew upon some of my own experiences as an adolescent. It concerns the 14-year old Marlise in the throes of anorexia who is hospitalized for a time on an adolescent wing of a psychiatric hospital and then left unsupervised in an ancestral home belonging to her family. Both Tee (in part two) and Marlise (in part one) are orphans — both have their lives changed by brief, intense relationships. At a certain point, while I was working on both narratives, I realized that I was really writing out of the same obsessions — time, aging, illness, survival, desire, denial, making, memory — and about some of the same characters, or at least characters that “rhymed” with one another — one cast of characters navigating the roil of adolescence in the early 1970s and the second biding time in middle and late middle age on the cusp of Trump’s election. Once I realized this, I began to develop new situations and characters that fed and swelled these two at first seemingly unrelated narrative streams. I made the choice to keep Marlise’s identity veiled in the second section so that the reader also might have the opportunity to see her anew.
In Michael Ondaatje’s novel Warlight, he writes:
“When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her hall of mirrors and I in mine.”
Paradise Close is not a memoir nor is it a self-portrait, any more than any writer’s creation must in some ways be a glimpse into the quality of mind of the writer. But what seems relevant here, to me, with regards to what I’m trying to do in the book, is the way in which the “orphan state” of many of the characters and their situations in the two narratives — “The Close” and “Shenandoah Valley” — are specular — so that the predicaments of the characters Marlise and Silas, say, find a revelatory counterpart in Tee and Em, just as the latter pair are illuminated by that section’s subplot concerning Beatrice and Otto. The first two parts of the novel both take place in abandoned ancestral houses — “paradise” means “enclosed space, garden.” Many of the names even seem to turn into and contain one another — Marlise, Silas, Maurice, Maddie … one of my daughters accused me of really wanting everyone to be named Lisa!
JVB: The tragic portrait of Silas and his quest to get to Marlise in Paradise Close during a blizzard is exhilarating and reminded me of Denis Johnson’s story, “Jesus’ Son,” for its portrayal of someone who is simultaneously prodigious, unstable, sincere, narcissistic, and generally the epitome of the stereotypical writer/artist. Marlise is much the opposite: late-blooming, empathetic, a survivor. Talk about these two portrayals of artists. Is anything essential in an artist’s character?
LRS: There are a lot of “makers” in this book — vintners, umbrella makers, bakers, candy makers, poets, farmers, printmakers, painters. On one level, I wanted to pay homage to my immigrant forebearers, many of whom settled in Philadelphia and its environs in the 19th-century to work at jobs that involved real craft, patience, toil, and pride in the tasks at hand. Since one unifying thread throughout the novel is what it means to move through what Keats called “the vale of soul-making,” the connections between craft/art and self/soul seemed natural, inevitable. So an impulse to make, I think, is essential in an artist’s character — to make meaning, to make beauty, to make sense — to make it, at all.
You’re absolutely right that Silas and Marlise are very different kinds of artists, though there are connections also. Although Silas is not an orphan, his cultured parents are remote, physically and emotionally. In lieu of real connection, they pay for his art schooling and send expensive materials to various hospitals to support his precocious talent. Genuinely gifted, his development as an artist is vexed by his mental illness and by his own misguided ambition for early success — an impulse perhaps fueled by a premonition of what kind of time his demons are going to allow him to develop. Marlise’s art also grows out of pain and illness, but it evolves gradually, over time, transforming as she transforms. One engine of this novel, for me, is the question “Why do some survive travail and some do not?” Silas’s bond with Marlise has much to do with his own self-protectiveness and delusions, but in his fugue state plan to rescue her, he realizes and acts upon an impulse of selflessness. He finally does what he thinks he needs to do to save her, a move that sends him back to the hospital and to the shock treatments his parents have arranged for him, putting into motion forces that also contribute to his fate.
I’m a bit of a late bloomer, myself, not publishing my first full-length poetry collection until I was just shy of 40. And now, this novel emerging in my 60s. Life in all of its complexities and exigencies has protracted whatever “career” I have, but it’s enriched that journey beyond saying.
JVB: Dwelling in this world of “makers” is one of the most intoxicating aspects of the book, as is your attention to place: geography, dialect, culture. Different places make appearances, but the Philadelphia area is the darling. Did you choose to set most of the story there or was it inevitable? What was it like to dwell imaginatively in a place you remembered?
LRS: Yes, Philadelphia and South Jersey are the locus of Part One, and in many ways “The Close” is my love song to that part of the planet. My paternal grandmother was born in Germantown, Philadelphia, to immigrants from Bavaria. Many of my great-great aunts and uncles, also immigrants from Germany, worked at various trades — candy-making, baking — in Philadelphia. My grandmother’s nuclear family eventually moved across the Delaware into the New Jersey town of Riverside, across the Rancocas Creek from the small town of Delanco — a portmanteau of Delaware and Rancocas — where they ran a small grocery store until my paternal great-grandfather, a volunteer fireman, died from pneumonia contracted as a result of smoke inhalation while putting out a fire. My grandmother had just finished 8th grade and had to quit school to work in a nylon stocking factory to help her mother support two younger siblings. Eventually she married a farmer, and my father and his sister were raised on this farm along the Rancocas River. I was fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time on that farm as a child and teenager, and when I’ve been asked to name what inspired me to become a poet, a writer, I really have to point to the beauty and belonging afforded me by that stretch of river — the peach orchards and cornfields — and to the people I came to know there — either in person, or through family stories about relatives, other denizens along the river, and various squatters who lived on the property over the years. Paradise Close is an imagined world, but it has some actual geographical places and people in its DNA.
I did some research about the German immigrant community in Philadelphia in the 19th century, but made the choice otherwise to depict places — the Institute, Paradise Close, the marina — as various characters might have experienced them. To answer your question — it was a joy and a privilege to immerse myself imaginatively in a place I was free to draw upon in memory but also to transform in fiction. I point out in my Acknowledgments that Philadelphia, South Jersey, Virginia are all, to paraphrase Marianne Moore, very real places with my imaginary toads in them. I took a lot of liberties with geographical, historical, and meteorological details, perhaps most notably conjuring up a South Jersey blizzard in the March of 1971. There wasn’t one.
JVB: There are two arresting narratives of physical love in Paradise Close: Bea and Otto and Tee and Em. Both involve marital infidelity on the women’s part and, though both end, the lovers don’t move on. I’m not sure most people get to experience such love, with its vertiginous intensity and high toll, but you write it so well. Is such love real? Is it worth it? Is life worth living without it?
LRS: First, I would say that, yes, yes. Yes! Life is worth living without that kind of extreme erotic and emotional entanglement and, as you say, the toll such involvements can take. But for the characters you name, I think that their brief but replete time with one another was a life-line, a priceless and rare and reciprocal gift that bodily memory registers in a way that perhaps supersedes or overtakes the mind’s recourse. I love what you say about how that somatic memory becomes a “partner in the lost lover’s stead.” Tee becomes, for Em, because of their physical bond, a kind of life partner. He’s unreplaceable and present with her as she ages, not just as a surrogate, but as a real presence that allows/invites Em to dilate into the life she’s always wanted to live — free but also held captive by the truths of embodied consciousness. As a person who has struggled to live in a body, Em/Marlise is granted that through the alembic, the intoxication, of Eros. In turn, what Tee experiences with Em, though it stymies him for a long time afterward, opens him up to the unlooked-for miracle of Juke. If love can enter and depart, can’t it also return? Beatrice continues to love Otto through Marlise. Otto, an isolato, though marred by grief, allows that not everyone is granted the kind of love he and Bea have shared, however short-lived, a genuine consolation near the end of his life.
JVB: Something that makes your love narratives so powerful is that you dig into descriptions of the physical, as you also do in describing Marlise’s body and the habits that accompany her anorexia. Each male character, in his love of a woman, seems absorbed by the details, and not romanticized ones, but complicated, real ones, of the body of the woman he loves.
LRS: I’m glad that the complexity and — I hope! — authenticity of my depictions of the soma in intense experiences of illness and erotic desire come through in your reading of Paradise Close. With Marlise, it was important to me not to narrate her experience of anorexia from the outside, or clinically, but to write out of the kind of body dysmorphia and denial that a person in the throes of anorexia endures. I wanted to do the same for various characters in the thrall of eros, as well. As Anne Carson puts it in Eros the Bittersweet: “your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be. What is this mode of perception, so different from ordinary perception that it is well described as madness? How is it that when you fall in love you feel as if suddenly you are seeing the world as it really is? A mood of knowledge floats out over your life. You seem to know what is real and what is not. Something is lifting you toward an understanding so complete and clear it makes you jubilant … It is a glance down into time, at realities you once knew, as staggeringly beautiful as the glance of your beloved.” That Anne Carson really has it going on! Later she writes, “To address yourself to the moment when Eros glances into your life and to grasp what is happening in your soul at that moment is to begin to understand how to live.” Otto, Beatrice, Marlise/ Em, and Tee each “suffers” a unique incursion of Eros and is forever transformed as a result. In order to make this believable, I had to lean into the particular ways in which body and mind share and shape unique experiences of the erotic.
JVB: I’m a big fan of Carson’s, and her intensely poetic prose reminds me of your prose, and I’m wondering whether her work more broadly, or her polygamy vis-a-vis genre generally, were inspirations for this project, and/or what other writers and texts were.
LRS: That you feel a kinship between my work and Carson’s in any way, shape, or form is a tremendous compliment to me. She really is a life force of nature and of the passionate mind. I love her difficulty and complexity, and I love this in all sorts of ways in all sorts of other writing, too. I’m old enough now that if I get a page or two into a novel or book of essays or poems and the language — its precision, freshness, music — and layered richness hasn’t utterly seduced me, I’ll put the book down and move on to something else, always someone new, if I can, often work by current and former students, but also longtime, perennial favorites, authors to whom I turn again and again, to fall in love anew with words, the miracle of them, and with mysteries and beauties of plot, image, and character to be found in the pages of writers like Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Toni Morrison, Carl Phillips, E. M. Forster, Vladimir Nabokov, William Shakespeare — the “problem” plays, in particular, Marguerite Duras, Emily Dickinson — those Master Letters! all her letters, in fact — Wallace Stevens, Marina Warner, Anton Chekhov, Angela Carter, Lucie Brock-Broido, and, yes Anne Carson. As you’ve intuited, I’m wildly attracted to hybridity, to texts far more daring than any of mine — Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, for instance, or Carson’s Nox, Woof’s Orlando …
Paradise Close is in many ways a book about books — there are allusions to Dickinson, Shakespeare, Golding, DeFoe, Tolkien, and my novel wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t read and re-read, throughout my life, “orphan” tales like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Louise Glück has a wonderful essay called “Invitation and Exclusion,” and it’s about writers who inspire one to write and others who can make a writer feel like shutting down for one reason or another. The writers I name above are writers who invite, challenge, and inspire me in my own work. A writer I’m reading now, a truly original stylist, is Kathryn Davis, perhaps best known for her mysterious, intrepid novels like The Silk Road and Versailles, but also for a recent short and brilliant memoir, Aurelia, Aurelia. I’ve been learning a lot from her work these days.
JVB: I love the portrait of Em as a not-always-fully-invested mother. I also love that in the end her relationship with her daughter and her daughter herself don’t really seem to suffer because of it.
LRS: Ha, yes. Em is not a helicopter parent. Not by a long shot. One senses that even before she falls into extramarital love, Em has not been the most attentive or overly involved parent to her daughter, absorbing herself instead in her teaching, her studio work, her graduate studies. All of this changes, of course, as various forces and circumstances draw mother and daughter closer. This happens at a crucial time for her adolescent daughter, which may explain why they survive any benign negligence early on. Em/Marlise is, after all, an orphan — she had no mother figure in her own life. This novel is in many ways her story, her slow development into motherly, artistic, and self-fruition. I think that the unlooked-for ways in which Silas and Tee see and change Em/Marlise allow her to understand that love doesn’t have to be earned or merited, not by lover, parent, or child. It’s a gift economy.
JVB: Letting go and holding onto things are themes in this novel that resonate beyond possessions: identities, relationships, and the body itself are things that your characters have to reckon with. Talk about these opposing impulses, both of which can be destructive if taken too far, and our need to make peace with the central problem of impermanence, for which the body is the mascot.
LRS: I love this: “the central problem of impermanence, for which the body is the mascot.” Not surprisingly coming from you, Jasmine, a little poem unto itself. And this phrase of yours sent me to the Thesaurus, where I learned that mascot, which I think many of us think of as something like a bulldog that represents a football team, has its origins as “a talisman, charm, thing supposed to bring good luck to its possessor,” also “person whose presence is supposed to be a cause of good fortune,” and derives from provincial French mascotte — “sorcerer’s charm, ‘faerie friend,’ good luck piece: (19c.), of uncertain origin, perhaps from or related to mascoto “sorcery, fetish” from masco “witch,” perhaps from Medieval Latin masca “mask, specter, nightmare.” I like how this suggests that the living, loving body, made to expire, is in some ways a miracle, a site of bewitching tides and forces and impulses, a mascot, as you say, for the inevitability and inexorability of life’s sentence. Paradise Close is very much about the tension between hoarding/holding on — to places, to life, to hurt, to whatever might give us a sense of control — insomnia, tinkering with clocks, not eating, creating art — and letting go — of control, of fear, of love, eventually of life itself. A central question for me from the get-go of this project is something I alluded to earlier and which Marlise muses on: “Why do some get to live, to survive and thrive, and some do not? Why are some brought into the light, some blighted by shadow, history, circumstance? Some rescued? Some left behind, forgotten? Why are some saved, and saved, and saved again, only to be lost forever? Why are some utterly and for so long lost, only to be graciously, profoundly found?”
I think time is at the beating heart of Paradise Close. Clocks and timepieces abound, lives intertwine, the past and present float over one another at every turn, and characters are afforded Edenic, “out of time” eddies, ecstasies that are perforce transient but nonetheless indelible. “Close,” of course, refers to a vineyard; Paradise Close is the name of Marlise’s family home — granted, the main ancestral house has been built around a hundreds-years-old pear tree. That’s got to evoke a bit of lost Eden and imply the tension between kairos and chronos, God-time and human time. But I think that the title also suggests that while a paradisial state can’t be sustained for living human beings, once truly experienced it is ever close by, accessible, especially in bodily memory. Humans may have lost paradise with the Fall, but being thrust out of the Garden, where all desires are known and no secrets are hidden, forces us into consequence, consciousness, volition, and the miraculous recompense of language. Because we do not last, how and what and who we love matters.
JVB: The idea of how, who, and what we love mattering puts me in mind of your recent New and Selected Poems, Madrigalia. This collection reconfirmed for me a theme I’ve long cherished in your work — that human love, and the longing that necessarily accompanies it, is a crucible that refines the soul and readies us spiritually for something beyond. Would you agree with this mystical reading of your speakers?
LRS: I love that you see this in my work, Jasmine. I agree that human love, embodied love, perhaps specifically erotic love — desire, jealousy, longing, pleasure, the body in love — especially the sick or aging body, but even the young body in full vigor because after all we can’t fully BE our lover — help show us our limits, our edges, and that allows us to have a sense of what is beyond our limits — the sentence of our lives the boundaries of our bodies: what they can bear, enter, hold — until they can’t any longer. By which time one hopes to be ready to surrender to the great mystery beyond this mortal coil.
JVB: I was surprised that you used a formal designation for the title of the book. And your epigraph, an etymology suggesting “madrigal” might be derived from the Latin for “womb,” complicates the title. Talk about your choice of title and epigraph.
LRS: I began calling the sonnet-haunted poems I was writing “madrigals” because, for one, I love musical madrigals, and two, because — though not strictly borrowing the madrigal form in any way — my poems often have the feel of polyphonic, intricate songs. It was a while before I thought to look up its etymology — what a delight to find the word cognate with words meaning “inventive” and “womb.” A womb is inventive, a matrix for making new life. So is a poem. Words amaze me.
JVB: You have a take-it-or-leave-it confidence when it comes to form — many of your madrigals are in couplets, and some flirt with the sonnet. Talk about your relationship to the sonnet and tell me — what makes a good couplet?
LRS: “What makes a good couplet?” is one of the best questions I’ve ever been asked. I began working more formally — with white space, rhyme, compression, couplets — in part because the language of my poems is often so damasked, baroque, and dense. I think I’m attracted to couplets for the same reason I love rhyme and especially slant rhyme — and also mixing up “masculine” and “feminine” rhymes. It’s sexy. You have these two words and they’re rubbing up against one another, speaking to one another, getting inside one another, and reverberating in all sorts of semantic and sonic and unexpected, figurative ways. A good couplet should do that also — the pairing should feel inevitable, surprising, provocative, endlessly interesting if read in various ways, replete with secrets — haha, maybe the same answer might be offered for “What makes a good couple?”
As for the sonnet, I’ve always loved to read them, but never felt drawn to composing one until Neil Perry at Hampden-Sydney Review asked me to write one for a special issue on the sonnet. I attempted, he took the poem, and after that I couldn’t seem to stop writing them. At first I tried to keep to the traditional forms, Italian or Shakespearean, especially the latter, in terms of meter and rhyme scheme. After a while, though, the only two strictures I adhered to were that the poems would be 14 lines long and that there would be some sort of rhyme scheme. Terrance Hayes calls a sonnet a combination music box and meat grinder, and I think I am also attracted to that lyric intensity afforded by the sonnet. Writing sonnets felt like a new adventure, but Debra Nystrom pointed out to me that most of the poems in Orexia, the book I published just before Madrigalia, contained a lot of 14 – 15-line poems in couplets. So I think I’d been moving in that direction for a while.
JVB: I think your speakers are most forthright with the reader when they talk about language and the writing process. In “Nest” you write, “Life’s a parsing of the verb to hide,” and in “Accidental,” “the key / signature of any day’s measure can be altered // of a wild sudden. How a deleted ‘i’ / turns another word to ‘marred,’ for instance.” Talk about these moments where the speaker reflects on the act of language making and arrangement and why they feel so intimate.
LRS: I think this goes back to my word jones and to what happens to words when they’re juxtaposed or put under pressure. I read the dictionary and Thesaurus all the time, and that’s sometimes where I’ll find some surprising words whose denotation and connotations reveal something emotional or psychologically relevant to me at the moment. I also have terrible handwriting and don’t see all that well. I think the married/marred perception was a result of my having written “married” but hastily, so it looked like “marred.” I felt joy the moment I realized that the word “rose” was an anagram of “eros.”
JVB: Publishing a New and Selected is a well-deserved honor for your poetry. What did you learn about the form and about your work through creating/selecting it? For example, I noticed a shift in tone and style from the new poems to those selected from Glass Town. Did you feel that juxtaposition worked for the project? Did certain past poems emerge as naturals for reprinting and others self-select out? Did you want to select shorter poems to keep the theme of Madrigalia?
LRS: I did leave out of Madrigalia a lot of poems from Glass Town, my first full-length collection. It contained a lot of the kinds of poems I was trained to write in the 70’s and even early 80’s, poems driven more by story and confession than form, interiority, and sound. Interestingly, with one or two exceptions, the poems I chose from GT were poems that Donald Justice, a formalist and a visiting professor during my MFA years, were ones that he had praised. “A Doubt,” “Anorexia,” “Insomnia” — denser, more gnomic lyrics than the book’s primarily longer, more narrative poems. I think I made a stylistic leap with Blue Venus, my second book. Somehow getting Glass Town between covers freed me to work in ways that felt more true to me and my sensibilities. One thing that happened between the two books is that one summer I read all of Emily Dickinson’s poems. They blew my mind. Doors flew open in and for me and my own work after that experience.
I did include from Glass Town, however, the longest poem I’ve ever written, “Reading Jane Eyre on the Grounds of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital” — five pages! — because it represents, in many ways, the very beginning of my grappling with the material that would become my novel, Paradise Close.
JVB: I still struggle with evaluating the right level of ambiguity in a poem: too clear, and there is no mystery, too opaque and there is no foothold for meaning and the accompanying buy-in from the reader. You always seem to get this right in your poems. Guide us.
LRS: This is a balance I’m always trying to strike in every poem I pen. On the poetic spectrum of transparent to obdurate, I’m definitely hanging out with Plath and Dickinson and Hopkins on the difficult end. But I always try to include enough quotidian, vernacular, or pop cultural detail — in some form — image, sound, allusion — to give the reader, as you say, a foothold, a place to buy in to the poem. George Steiner talks about difficulty, yes? There’s “contingent” difficulty, as in — the piece is in a foreign language you can’t read or speak. “Modal” difficulty is conceptual — as in, I am not smart enough to understand what’s being said — think Stephen Hawking brilliance. In “tactical” texts, the difficulty is that the text doesn’t want you to understand it — it’s encoded. And the fourth difficulty Steiner explores is “ontological” — what it takes to mean something is questioned. Conditions of what it takes to produce meaning are called into difficulty. Disruptions in syntax, varied levels of diction, for example, or deployment of figurative stereoscopy or capsized semantic expectations, surprises, and always confrontations with mystery, ineffability, the places words cannot go. And so I guess I would say that the difficulty in my work falls into the last category. My speakers are often questioning whether they can speak at all. On the other hand, there is so much longing and reach in the poems, so much “looking around,” as Charles Wright would say of his own poetics — so much seeking of beauty. And I think this attentiveness to the natural world and the realm of the body keep, when they work, difficult poems from leaving the reader outside of them, while at the same time making or leaving space for mystery, for the ineffable.
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To acquire a copy of Paradise Close and/or Madrigalia directly from the publisher, Persea Books, click here.