New Books In Poetry

In Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), Lisa Olstein‘s poems are concerned with the tension between the public and the personal and how the former bullies its way into the latter. Olstein’s book is both provoked into existence and inspired by our contemporary moment. Its urgency makes sense when one sees Little Stranger as a book that is responding to the twilight of privacy, in which delivery systems of information are networks networking with other networks. Information ricochets into individual lives in a stream of binary extremes: on the one hand we have unprecedented access to knowledge, while on the other hand we sense the great proximity between ourselves and the authentic. At times, one can feel trapped into making one of two extreme decisions: to retreat into social fantasy or devote one’s life to resisting a world that seeks to know our every move as if to empower us, when actually it often does the opposite. But the poems in Little Stranger reflect a more realistic picture