Joseph Lease

Joseph Lease' s Fire Season, composed in the heat of global and personal apocalypse, is one of the most intimate books I've ever encountered. " I'm writing inside death, I'm / in the room." Anyone who comes this close to death succumbs to its power to eradicate all pretense. Lease's language is simple, direct: " what is real / (maybe sunlight / (my mother's face." Words reappear like recurring dreams, brilliantly embodying Jack Spicer's dictum: " A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary." The prosody here is tightly structured yet raw, employing a subtle lyricism that at times turns insistent, tugging the reader's sleeve like an urgent child. Open parentheses permeate the text like stutters or ruptured membranes. They connect, shield, spill, but never ever close. Fire Season is achingly beautiful. Halfway through my first read I started crying. -- Dodie Bellamy

"Promise me the rich can't sleep," Joseph Lease begs in The Body Ghost, offering poems as light on the page as nursery rhymes, and as powerful as prayer. Here, verse conjures up the body in pain, the body politic in collapse, and the tensile strength of the filaments that connect us.

Joseph Lease on tunnustettu amerikkalainen nykyrunoilija. Hän on julkaissut neljä runokokoelmaa, ja hänen runojaan on julkaistu eri antologioissa sekä lukuisissa kirjallisuuslehdissä. Hajonnut maailma esittelee Leasen runoutta ensimmäistä kertaa suomeksi. Alkuteos Broken World ilmestyi 2007. Teoksessa hahmottuu maa nimeltä Amerikka ja suuri historiallinen kysymys demokratiasta. Hajonnut maailma antaa äänen niille, jotka uhkaavat kadota kansakunnan suurten hankkeiden, hegemonisoitujen unelmien ja piinkovan talousjärjestelmän alle. Runoihin heijastuu ekologinen huoli mutta myös luottamus omakohtaiseen luonto- ja kielisuhteeseen.

“Poems as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. . . . An exquisite collection!”—Marjorie PerloffWith musical grace critics have likened to that of Robert Creeley, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams, Joseph Lease mixes a storyteller’s rhythm with lyric beauty to create a collection filled with humor, political bite, and psychological intensity. In a country where “money has won everywhere,” but the essential promise of democracy still beckons, these poems uncover our troubled psyches and show us what it might mean to be “Free Again.”