{"id":393,"date":"2014-03-03T20:29:12","date_gmt":"2014-03-03T19:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/?page_id=393"},"modified":"2020-09-21T19:47:58","modified_gmt":"2020-09-21T17:47:58","slug":"reviews-of-her-book","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/reviews-of-her-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Her Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Lisa Williams wrote an incredibly sensitive and thoughtful review of\u00a0Her book<\/em> in\u00a0The Rumpus.<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>A favorite paragraph from the review:<\/p>\n

An alternate archive that is vibrant and inclusive rather than \u201cthin\u201d and \u201cpermanent,\u201d \u00c9ireann Lorsung\u2019s\u00a0Her Book<\/a><\/em>\u00a0records the poet\u2019s journey towards making, from a tangle of personal, historical, and artistic material, a voice of her own. At the same time, Lorsung\u2019s is not a self-centered project. Within the poems, and through their homages to other women, Lorsung writes toward a community, sharing her creativity, experience, and attention. She does all of this in mostly short, lyrically intense, accessible poems that meet us instantly on the page, while unfolding more over multiple readings\u2014her own \u201cgentle apocalypse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charlotte Bhakskar wrote a deeply touching review of my second collection,\u00a0Her book<\/em><\/a>, in\u00a0Zyzzyva<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>A few quotations:
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Her book<\/i>\u00a0(Milkweed; 76 pages), the latest poetry collection from \u00c9ireann Lorsung, is a surprising and eloquent look into a highly physical, sensuous world. In particular, Lorsung is concerned with the delineation of the (female) self as it relates to its surroundings, both natural and constructed. Through many small moments that are exactingly crystalized, she builds a powerful, wider vision of a woman\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

Lorsung\u2019s voice is uniquely suited to interpreting Smith\u2019s work. For one, her imagery grounds itself heavily in the physical, in ways both recognizable and startling, allowing us to reimagine Smith\u2019s art on the page.<\/p>\n

Together, these lines begin a discourse that will continue through the book\u2014a discourse touching on modern womanhood, on bodies \u201cspeaking\u201d their own physical language, and on archives and the ways one\u2019s physical surroundings can act as part of this language.<\/p>\n

Lorsung is particularly concerned with underscoring the small pleasures and victories that come from inhabiting flesh [and]\u00a0\u00a0in the tangibility of everyday objects, especially feminine-coded objects such as dresses, gardening tools, or knitting.<\/p>\n

If Lorsung is attending to small, potentially frivolous things in her poems, such as \u201cstocks of flower seed […] pressed leaves, books of poems, tea in packets […] paper birds and animals with pin joints,\u201d it is with a deliberate knowingness (though certainly not irony\u2014Lorsung never devalues the domestic or the comforting). Lorsung\u2019s assured and careful cataloguing of these \u201cmost secret things\u201d is more than mere color. In \u201cSingle-page drawing,\u201d from Lorsung\u2019s final poem cycle, \u201cReconstruction,\u201d her speaker declares, \u201cthe mark of my hand is a hand-shaped print. \/ Listen! I\u2019m making these things to show you I was \/ here. The outline of\u00a0my<\/i>\u00a0hand.\u00a0My<\/i>\u00a0body.\u00a0My<\/i>\u00a0dresses.\u201d Each of these personal moments, then, collide and link to form a compelling picture of a felt presence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lisa Williams wrote an incredibly sensitive and thoughtful review of\u00a0Her book in\u00a0The Rumpus.\u00a0A favorite paragraph from the review: An alternate archive that is vibrant and inclusive rather than \u201cthin\u201d and \u201cpermanent,\u201d \u00c9ireann Lorsung\u2019s\u00a0Her Book\u00a0records the poet\u2019s journey towards making, from a tangle of personal, historical, and artistic material, a voice of her own. At the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-393","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":567,"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/393\/revisions\/567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}