Lewis Warsh

Animated by a poignant blend of humor, pathos, joie de vivre, and nostalgia, ELIXIR is an extended meditation on everyday life and the passage of time. Fragments of narrative, overheard dialogue, song lyrics, and slant memoir surface and recede throughout. Examining the inseparable entanglement of the quotidian and the profound with wit and candor, these poems are personal, direct, and elusive at the same time. Contemporary Poetry. American Poetry. New York Poet. New York School.

Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh wrote Piece of Cake as a work of collaborative prose poetry, based on a process of each writing on alternate days in the course of August of 1976-the bicentennial year of the America's Declaration of Independence. It recounts the quotidian details of daily activities, negotiating the exigencies of young, married-with-children life, the artistic path and citizenship. It has the classic "I did this, I did that" of a New York School of Poetry text, as characterized by the poetry of Frank O'Hara, and is somewhat reminiscent of Mayer's work Studying Hunger Journal, written not long before taking up Piece of Cake. Another distinguishing feature of this work is that it is arguably the first significant male-female collaboration in 20th century American poetry. Regarding the possible derivation of the work's title, and exemplary of the work's tenor, is the start of Warsh's entry of August 29: "I also recall getting up and eating a piece of left-over cake (a very sweet store-bought cake with green or possibly pinkish icing) and drinking a glass of milk at the kitchen window. Empty streets, no moon. Michael and Twinkie asleep on the floor of Bernadette's room, Guy and Karen in mine, Bill on the couch in the living room. Marie in her crib. Everyone 'dead to the world,' a phrase I dislike, what a full house."

Out of the Question: Selected Poems 1963-2003 gathers together a generous sample of work from Lewis Warsh's many earlier collections. Warsh has been associated with the community of New York School writers who first met at The Poetry Project in Manhattan in the late 1960s, but as poet Forrest Gander writes, in a review of Warsh's book Inseparable, "his influence has been felt nationally and internationally." Out of the Question includes two long poems: The Suicide Rates, first published in 1967, and The Corset, which appeared in 1986. Novelist Paul Auster described The Corset as "not a poem so much as a new way of seeing the world. There is a stunning intelligence at work here, a fierce, deadpan wit that disturbs and enlightens in equal measure." Auster's comment can be applied to all of Warsh's ongoing experiments, as both a poet and a fiction writer, and Out of the Question is the best possible introduction to anyone unfamiliar with his multi-layered body of work.

Fiction. Over 20 Years of Stories. "What a pleasure to have all these stories by Lewis Warsh in one volume They tend to be low-key, almost off- hand, but each with a poetic kernel that infects and defuses throughout, which makes them (though it is a critical cliche to say it this way) haunting. But that's what they do. They haunt. That's what the best writing does, often without excessive flashiness or even letting us know, as the narrative drifts through the material from which each is constructed, how it's done. These are extraordinary tales." Samuel R. Delany "Lewis Warsh's narrative always speaks to itself from a lyric threshold. A postmodern Delmore Schwartz yearning, mordant, suspenseful." Gloria Frym "Lewis Warsh moves through the crowded street, a reporter, pad in hand and pencil behind ear. The sentences hold the simple truths of his heart. That amidst the nearly incomprehensible violence of daily life one reality is a singular desire love. The purity of love, the essence of love. Recalling the quiet resonance of Salinger, drawing the curtain on the horror of inhumanity, settling down on rumpled sheets, alone or in reach of salvation, Lewis reports with poet- investigator eye that love has come to save the day." Thurston Moore "The straight-from- the-shoulder idiom that powers Lewis Warsh's writing is a marvel of economy. Evoking memory without nostalgia, moving the reader without sentimentality, the stories in ONE FOOT OUT THE DOOR are lucid, formally adventurous, and emotionally complex. Like Stephen Dixon and Leonard Michaels, two other masters of plainspoken cosmopolitanism and rueful reflection, Lewis Warsh uses ordinary language as a means to an extraordinary inventiveness." Christopher Sorrentino"

A Place in the Sun is a beautifully rendered and expertly deconstructed novel. Warsh's stunningly effective use of multiple narratives, provided in exquisitely detailed lines, conveys an elastic and powerful emotional honesty. This is a sensual and desperate story from a writer with formidable powers of invention. Donald Breckenridge

Inseparable collects poems written between 1995 and 2005 by the New York poet, editor and novelist Lewis Warsh. Strongly identified with New York since the 1960s, when he co-founded Angel Hair magazine with Anne Waldman, Warsh makes poems from the city’s linguistic fabric, interwoven with a bemused real-time interiority. The 35 poems of this collection are pitted with reminiscences made approachable to the reader by their lack of self-absorption; it is the momentum of the will to persist by means of language--“moving, word by word”--against the incipient flickerings of mortality, that is their real logic. This act of self-propulsion may be subject to doubt (“Can we spend our lives feeding/off simple endurance?”), but it is humbly pursued: Warsh resists the inflated rhetoric such preoccupations usually attract and sticks instead with (in the words of his colleague Clark Coolidge) “confusion, in strict order.”

Fiction. Billie is a Senior at East Winston High when she tutors Ted, the star of the basketball team. But Ted has a drinking problem. He also has a minor fetish, a request that leads Billie on avicarious search for herself through the characters in the books she loves to "plow through." But Billie's new sexual awareness takes her far beyond Ted, into the lives of East Winston'stroubled, suburban angst, where, for one early 1980's school season, she learns the differencebetween a storied life and reality. "The heroine is a hoops-shooting, Madame Bovary-reading American kid trying to figure it all out. As we follow Billie in and out of love, limning with her the edges of despair and hope, Warsh leadsus deep into the 'hum of human machinery, ' a territory where all but essentials are weeded out. Part bildungsroman, part commentary on American life in the 80s, TED'S FAVORITE SKIRT is atrenchant, lovely wonder"--Laird Hunt. Other Lewis Warsh titles available from SPD include INSEPARABLE: POEMS 1995-2005, THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD, TOUCH OF THE WHIP, and MONEY UNDER THE TABLE. He is at present on the faculty of Long Island University in Brooklyn

"In his wry and deadpan way, Warsh emphasizes that in the contemporary world he has described, there are no Anna Kareninas, no Emma Bovarys--only Agnes and Sally and their similarly bewildered mates, Jacob and Bob."--Barbara Guest