While She Poses

By Lisa Alexander Baron

We know Lisa Alexander Baron as a sensitive and psychologically probing poet. In this new collection she takes us on a mysterious, three-tiered journey from the past into the present. First, she explores ancient statuary and tombs; we meet life-like Antigone and Ariadne among others. Next, we encounter a bird, fox, doll-things that still "live" today; we see poems grow out of paintings and photographs. And we start to realize a richness of poetic structures: long and short lines, a line broken into word clusters, sections, central alignment-all enhancing the subject matter, every poem a song. Finally, we enter a more exploratory, impressionistic world. We conclude that Baron uses unique subject matter; that her imagery is delicate and at the same time startling. What a marvelous concept of Penelope out-spinning the spiders that watch her! I will leave you with an example of the poet's exquisite wording from the opening of "Upon Reading a Whale Can Have Vestigial Hind Legs": "What called you back to the sea? What dream fragments did you drop on shore? Did scattered sunlight under the water draw you like a fugue? Is the sureness of the mountains too stifling?" -Ray Greenblatt In the poems of While She Poses, we find unflinching examinations of feeling, often pain-filled, expressed in graceful, lyrical language that intensifies both the language and the remembered or imagined emotion. These poems focus on a wide variety of phenomena: from boys in cellars scrubbing pots but treasuring a willow basket of fruit to those devoured by the great tigers of Sundarbans, called to become part of the great story, to join brethren dead in their walk "through the halls and libraries of the great beast's limbs." The subjects of these poems live in precarious situations but demonstrate for the reader small points of luminescent hope, unexpected epiphanies. Here we find voices for the mute: A Tiffany shade is conscious of its new "domed luminescence" filled with electric light. A parlor organ is the sole emissary of culture and graciousness in the Nebraska prairie of 1880. We access the rich inner life of an artist's young model as she gazes out from a painted room. As you read these poems, in this space of time, you will begin to understand, as does the narrator in Walking without glasses, how joyous and interesting it is to "watch a man walking" and mistake his long, white ponytail, "for a set of wings." -Tree Riesener

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692307354
• ISBN13: 9780692307359
• Release Date: November 2014
• Publisher: Aldrich Press
• Length: 66 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.1" x 6.0"