Impossible Object
Winner of the Tenth Gate Prize
Letters to a Young Poet
Out of our arguments with ourselves, what is lost
in translation is news that stays news, a small (or large)
machine made of words that makes nothing
happen, comes nearer to vital truth than history
and must go in fear, be as new as foam, as old
as the rock, have something in it that is barbaric
vast and wild, a way of taking life by the throat.
And out of this turning within, out of this immersion
in your own world, as if the top of my head were taken off
for lack of what is found there or in the journal
of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the sky
in the best words, in the best order, put things before
his eyes: imaginary gardens with real toads that spring
from genuine feeling that the mind is dangerous
and my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me—
The poems in Impossible Object trace the experience of the self as a reader, treating books as formative, a central part of life—as important to the construction of identity and memory as events or experiences. Interacting with a wide range of books, from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Lisa Sewell investigates the formation of the lyric self in relationship to reading along several trajectories: as an event; as the background to world events; and as the background to significant events in her own life.
Praise for Impossible Object
“Lisa Sewell has invented a new poetic genre. I’d call the mode ekphrastic, but ekphrasis doesn’t quite capture it. She eats, sleeps, and breathes books. Books are her lime flower tea—she recovers the past in books. Books are her avenue to political witness—they afford a foundational grammar for feeling and moral awareness. Books are her oxygen and elementary language. . . urgent, fresh, these poems acknowledge no divisions in the world, not between the landscape and the printed page, not between her neighbor’s suffering and her own being spared, not between the private and the public worlds. And this is the impossible object espoused in each and every line: connection in its purest form.”
– Linda Gregerson
“In these sharp, arresting poems, Lisa Sewell writes out of a place and time ‘when there is never a where or right place.’ As the worlds of literature and life reflect, refract and conflate, she creates a space that is spellbindingly present.”
– Arthur Sze
“To speak of reading is to speak of love: it is the act when Eros enters into you and you either find or lose yourself. In this brilliant book, Lisa Sewell speaks of encounters with books that ‘translate us back’ to our inherited world or translate us ahead into another world which is as disturbing as it is comforting, full of outrage and tenderness. . . . a book of wonder and great extension of sympathy.”
– Bruce Smith
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