Joseph Lease, Human Rights
ISBN: 1-58498-101-6, $14.95
Praise for Joseph Lease’s poetry:
“I regard Joseph Lease as the best poet of his generation. This is a poetry filled with stories that are built to last. This is a poet who will become a major voice in American poetry.” --David Shapiro
“Human Rights is a remarkable accomplishment, telling a complex story of human rites and their often painful authority with a range of resources any poet would be blessed to command. This singular book marks the beginning of what promises to be in all senses a brilliant career.” --Robert Creeley
“The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies (‘If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money’), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!” —Marjorie Perloff
“In the tragic vein, written at the end of the American experiment, fueled by a desire like all lasting desires continually thwarted, struggling to be born, Testify places itself at the latest hour and era of commodification—‘my scream is a brand name’—and works to lift language and therefore being and spirit toward a new utterance: ‘past the water’s skin’ ‘body come undone’ to a ‘good old blank page.’ Testify, a great book, places itself at America’s street corner of Origin and Decay. A delicate, tentative lyricism arises full of want, and Lease is its astonished keeper.” --Gillian Conoley
“Few poets these days are publishing verse this musically alive.” —The Boston Phoenix
“A new volume by Joseph Lease is cause for celebration by the most discerning readers and writers of poetry.” --Sheila Murphy, Jacket2
“Lease deserves to be regarded as one of our strongest contemporary political/experimental poets.” --Thomas Fink, Octopus
See also:
https://www.cca.edu/academics/faculty/jlease
http://jacketmagazine.com/14/damon-lease.html
ISBN: 1-58498-101-6, $14.95
Praise for Joseph Lease’s poetry:
“I regard Joseph Lease as the best poet of his generation. This is a poetry filled with stories that are built to last. This is a poet who will become a major voice in American poetry.” --David Shapiro
“Human Rights is a remarkable accomplishment, telling a complex story of human rites and their often painful authority with a range of resources any poet would be blessed to command. This singular book marks the beginning of what promises to be in all senses a brilliant career.” --Robert Creeley
“The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies (‘If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money’), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!” —Marjorie Perloff
“In the tragic vein, written at the end of the American experiment, fueled by a desire like all lasting desires continually thwarted, struggling to be born, Testify places itself at the latest hour and era of commodification—‘my scream is a brand name’—and works to lift language and therefore being and spirit toward a new utterance: ‘past the water’s skin’ ‘body come undone’ to a ‘good old blank page.’ Testify, a great book, places itself at America’s street corner of Origin and Decay. A delicate, tentative lyricism arises full of want, and Lease is its astonished keeper.” --Gillian Conoley
“Few poets these days are publishing verse this musically alive.” —The Boston Phoenix
“A new volume by Joseph Lease is cause for celebration by the most discerning readers and writers of poetry.” --Sheila Murphy, Jacket2
“Lease deserves to be regarded as one of our strongest contemporary political/experimental poets.” --Thomas Fink, Octopus
See also:
https://www.cca.edu/academics/faculty/jlease
http://jacketmagazine.com/14/damon-lease.html