Impossible Object

About Lisa Sewell

Lisa Sewell is the author of The Way Out, Name Withheld, and Long Corridor, which received the 2008 Keystone Chapbook award. She is also co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of two anthologies of essays on contemporary poetry. A recipient of grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, the NEA, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, she teaches at Villanova University.

Praise for Impossible Object

Lisa Sewell has invented a new poetic genre. I’d call the mode ekphrastic, but ekphrasis doesn’t quite capture it. She eats, sleeps, and breathes books. Books are her lime flower tea—she recovers the past in books. Books are her avenue to political witness—they afford a foundational grammar for feeling and moral awareness. Books are her oxygen and elementary language. And therefore, these poems are anything but bookish. They are urgent; they are fresh; they acknowledge no divisions in the world, not between the landscape and the printed page, not between her neighbor’s suffering and her own being spared, not between the private and the public worlds. And this is the impossible object espoused in each and every line: connection in its purest form.
—Linda Gregerson

In these sharp, arresting poems, Lisa Sewell writes out of a place and time “when there is never a where or right place.” As the worlds of literature and life reflect, refract and conflate, she creates a space that is spellbindingly present.
—Arthur Sze

To speak of reading is to speak of love: it is the act when Eros enters into you and you either find or lose yourself. In this brilliant book, Lisa Sewell speaks of encounters with books that “translate us back” to our inherited world or translate us ahead into another world which is as disturbing as it is comforting, full of outrage and tenderness. The territory she describes is “between a bleed and a blundering of borders.” It is a place in between civilization and its discontents with its indistinguishable wishes and fears and the primary pleasure of being seized by the imagined. It’s a book of wonder and great extension of sympathy.
—Bruce Smith