"Lisa Bourbeau's elegant, insightful poems carefully track the imprint of the invisible on what we see and feel. On almost every page there is the signature of sensual intimacy in the verbal rehearsal of small flames which, when ignited, entice the elements to touch and part like hidden lips. Through Bourbeau's gaze, we watch the world displacing itself at each turn as presence stands in for absence, and time forces us back upon earlier versions of ourselves buried inside the new now. Her unfailing poet's eye and ear bring quotidian details into a philosophical, revelatory awareness of the world at odds with itself in the very mode of its unfolding. "…the almost // written word stakes claim, and claim / again, between which a comma // arches its back against significance, / it's tail swung up to draw first blood."
-- Charles Borkhuis

"What does not kill us only makes us seek." Lisa Bourbeau's poetry amazes, and sometimes stuns, my own imaginative apprehension of the world as ethos. These are poems which reach deep into personal experience and transform the seemingly impersonal universe into that which it has always been: truths opening to the perceptive, and receptive, eye. Their music never ceases as a road of translation and one wanders in its unknowing, wondering what the poetry might itself create out of this 'vastness' relentlessly entered. These are poems "yielding angels and cabbages, that raw embrace. In which all intersections are/ a field of seams/unraveling."

Each new poem deepens a gift of 'vastness'."
-- John High

Bourbeau's complex yet precise music, syncopated and often dissonant, manifests a struggle never to compromise, insist, or intend. Her words are driven in part by a determination to admit nothing to the poem but what can be intimately and irrevocably known. The perfect clarity that results places her work among the most ambitious poems of our time and the most difficult to write, poems of immutable fact. Few poets working toward this end could approach Bourbeau's achievement in the poems collected here.
-- Edward Foster

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Excerpts from Cuttings from the Garden of Little Fears

***

Istanbul Light

Inside the broken palaces,
children are—

and the guardians of the heart
scramble over one another

to cast their fathers’ blackening word
into a silent,

silken song
of other ruin. There is no ascension,

no calling less than this: shadow and circumference
and the minarets’ blind echo,

all bed to that river
of blood, of stone

and pale gold scent –
aubergine become itself

inside a spice womb. You enter the name
that is wholly yours

in an exhange of eyes,
and your red

is the red owned by two
mouths, opening.

 ***

Jar

For Andres Serrano

Between legs & loaves & being
drawn by the eye of the worm to the iris

dayrise. The first day, in mourning.
Where immersion is (weed trampled

passage through salt taste
of skin) fingering the whole

out of quietude, into the glory
of. Light a lure. Fishes. The balance

of floating planks crossed & remembering
olive groves, gardens

(indelible ink on the sun’s
white wrist.) No reign of circumference

in the oils of unction. Fizz
of palm fronds. Gold

coins; seed’s sough
riding slantside

the intentional piercing. Our
accidental whirlwinds: no otherwise

in the throat’s
glance, no teeth (fled speech

on flayed tongues, prepared
for the coring.) Of beetles & chariots, thorns

nailed by glass & the voice
of the mote

swollen with castles. The unseen strut
(cast like a hook into

dead sea skin) of
the cock's crow.

The first day, in mourning.