About Lisa Hase-Jackson
Lisa Hase-Jackson’s award-winning poetry has appeared in such journals as The Midwest Quarterly, Kansas City Voices, The South Carolina Review, and others. Born in Portland, Oregon, and raised primarily in the Midwest, she has lived and taught in such cities as Seoul, Albuquerque, and Kansas City. Her current perch is Charleston, South Carolina where she is editor of Zingara Poetry Review.
Praise for Fire & Flint
Like the prairies that populate many of these poems, life often must be burned back to make way for growth. Lisa Hase-Jackson strikes the flinty surfaces of living and ignites a fire that both clarifies and illuminates. Spanning divorce, single motherhood, individuality, and love, Flint & Fire is a collection that burns with brave and honest beauty.
—Amy Fleury, author of Sympathetic Magic and Beautiful Trouble
In an age of obfuscation and linguistic relativism, Lisa Hase-Jackson’s poems are radical in their precision, beauty, and hard-earned knowledge. Married to place and landscape, they spring up from the writer’s personal mythology, and, like a patchworked crazy quilt tossed over the shoulder, they provide comfort as they survey the vulnerable tension between form and space, gain and loss, “substance and grief.” There is a burning intelligence and passion at work in these poems. Flint & Fire crackles and glows with a purity of lyricism we had no idea we’d lived without and now know we cannot.
—Rick Mulkey, author of Toward Any Darkness and Before the Age of Reason
Flint & Fire is a testament to American girlhood—poverty and violence, as well as persisting hope and joy. Flint & Fire is a testament to American womanhood—more poverty, more violence, and still that hope. Lisa Hase-Jackson’s poems are poems of survival—elegantly crafted testimonials, gorgeously empathetic narratives. She pays wildly democratic witness to addiction, racism, mental illness, incarceration, women’s shelter pamphlets, and subsidized apartment complexes. An important, fearless, beautiful, wholly American debut.
—Denise Duhamel, author of Blowout and Ka-Ching!
The major achievement of Lisa Hase-Jackson’s Flint & Fire is its ability to make plain the terrors of daily life through unflinching, direct statement. From the beginning to the end, this book is not shy about the need to question the ambitions put on us by capitalism and the assumed desire to join middle class America: “that we’ll catch up once we are happy, full, sated and clothed.” And this need to account for and to question becomes central in Hase-Jackson’s exact descriptions: “Store-front windows are thicker at the bottom/than they used to be and the Christmas wreath/in the antique mall, mired in wood smoke/and dust, is perennial now.” Flint & Fire is the beginning of a lovely career.
—Jericho Brown, Author of The Tradition
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