Taxonomy of the Missing

About Lisa Lewis

Lisa Lewis’s previous books include The Unbeliever (Brittingham Prize), Silent Treatment (National Poetry Series), Vivisect, Burned House with Swimming Pool (American Poetry Journal Prize), and The Body Double. A chapbook titled Story Box was also published as winner of the Poetry West Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Fence, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Best American Poetry. Recipient of awards from the American Poetry Review and the Missouri Review, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship, she teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as poetry editor for the Cimarron Review.

Praise for Taxonomy of the Missing

In Taxonomy of the Missing, Lisa Lewis writes of complex women as friends, mothers, sisters, “cat ladies,” dog walkers, and lovers. She writes with an astute awareness of class dynamics, the earth’s peril as a result of our violence, and our violent America—past and present. These poems of witness to our troubled times are also timeless in their longing and emotional candor. Lewis’s poems sing a stinging, stunning song.
—Denise Duhamel, author of Scald and Blowout

Lisa Lewis might be thrown by Oklahoma opponents into a headlock, but you best count on her to win by falling. You need this book on the welcome mat of your front porch. There are sad-ass poem-ballads in this book that often read like the blues. Her poems reveal the beauty and terror of gender, family, land, animals, and how we grovel for the human elixir that might save us from ourselves. In the title poem there is one line: Do you know I’m here? What is that single missing ingredient in the porridge of this poet-alchemist? I found it.
—Charles Fort, author of The Town Clock Burning and We Did Not Fear the Father

In Taxonomy of the Missing, Lisa Lewis’s sixth collection of poetry, the past is present, finely-detailed and filtered, but never diminished, by the kind of tender regret that accrues only after decades of lived experience. “I fought my miniature wars. Here are/my relics” declares the speaker of one poem, offering the only thing wisdom’s good for: self-acceptance. Here beats the rhythm of “an unconfounded, ordinary heart.”
—Leslie McGrath, Series Editor, author of Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage and Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives