Tag Archives: Rebecca Foust

Poetry Sunday: “Anchor” in Women’s Voices for Change

August 10, 2015 by Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet News Poems Reviews

Thanks to Rebecca Foust for featuring “Anchor” in her Poetry Sunday column at Women’s Voices for Change – and for her thoughtful, detailed look at this poem, and at free verse as a whole.

Praise for Lisa’s Work

Lisa’s editorial eye goes to the core of a poem. She’s highly intuitive, sensitive to each poem’s potential for depth and power.”

—Athena Kashyap

These multivocal poems reverberate with questions, asides, daydreams, mathematical calculations…. It is thrilling to follow Stonestreet on this journey, through patience and restlessness, moving from one thought to the next while she goes about the daily chores of looking after a young child. The speaker doesn’t seem dulled by the monotony and sleep deprivation but pressured by it – pressure [that] creates an intent intellectual scrutiny.”

—Sabotage Reviews

…a poem of vertiginous self-consciousness: its extremity of feeling countervailed by the pressure of silence it makes felt. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins in ‘No worst, there is none’, this poet brings experience to a pitch in language at once pared back and wild with its play of repeating words and sounds.”

—Porter Prize judges’ statement

A wonderfully alive, actively thinking attentiveness…. darting this way and that toward meaning, opening our eyes and ears, our minds, to continual change—personal, communal, and cosmic. Keenly aware of the potential ‘heat in the flint, light in the twig,’ she shows us how to see the very flux of life.”

—Reginald Gibbons

Radiant attentiveness, rare and gorgeous as it may be, is among the least of Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s gifts. Her real distinction is the uncanny ability to penetrate to the heart of an image: to trace its stern trajectories, to capture and unfold its inborn logic. Vision for Stonestreet involves a rigorous will-to-submit: this is both her method and her perpetual subject, her discipline and her reward. Tulips, Water, Ash is an extraordinary and heartening debut.”

—Linda Gregerson