Present and Future Storm

$20.00

By Lisa Lewis

There’s so much water running through this lion-hearted wail of a book that you might want to get to high ground before you read it. There’s flood water, of course, like “asphalt painted on / a painting of asphalt in a wet black parking lot.” But that’s just half of it. There’s also the water of having to carry a thousand types of otherness through a forbidding landscape running like a torrent through every page here. And there’s the water of regret—that water of “being / wrong clinging to clothing like smoke.” Nevertheless—and this is the miraculous part—this book also carries through it the mediative water of resistance, resilience, and even reclamation. It’s got grit! That’s its great strength: what a powerful thing it is to drag so much behind you “like a skirt / with a train,” and still sing so sweet.—Adrian Blevins, author of Status Pending

PLEASE NOTE: Book is releasing on October 20

About Lisa Lewis

Lisa Lewis has published eight previous collections of poetry, most recently Taxonomy of the Missing, and a chapbook, The Borrowing Days. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Dialogist, Action, Spectacle, Free State Review, Puerto del Sol, Clackamas Literary Review, Florida Review, New Letters, and elsewhere. She teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as editor-in-chief of the Cimarron Review.

Praise for Present and Future Storm

Here are stays against unexamined suspicion, floodwaters of bigotry and homophobia, mudslides of complacency. Neighbor McSwain drives by and waves “like he wants to be / my friend,” but an old reluctance, the automatic assumptions take hold, a look in the eye which isolates and dams. With the rain also comes resolve, even tenderness, hand-holding against the rising water, blacktop slickening, disappearing. Here’s a dam and a boat, and in such profound disorder, a sestina! Couplets! Here’s rich, complex music amid chaos, rain water with “nowhere to go but up.” This last couplet, by the way, is wonderfully reminiscent of another Lewis—“we’re here where the simplest shape of human touch doubled – what we call the art of love—is baked into the art of trouble.” Here’s good trouble.—Ralph Burns, author of But Not Yet