As Brenda Hillman notes in her Introduction, Larissa Szporluk "creates an animate new universe out of cryptic original speech" in these poems. Exploring how the mind orders experience—and how disorder, or different orders, affect that experience—Szporluk has produced a poetry of alien beauty, limning worlds where the inability to exert control results in a disturbing, overwhelming immediacy.

Dark Sky Question (Barnard New Women Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Szporluk, Larissa

United States

Beacon Press

This collection of short lyric poems evoke certain themes: interaction of and struggle between the human and natural world; violence, particularly against women and children; alienation and betrayal; the mysteries of the universe, God and death; and poetry itself.

Isolato (Iowa Poetry Prize)

Poetry

University Of Iowa Press

Poetry. Szporluk has often been read and praised as a visionary surrealist, but her body of work, evinced by VIRGINALS, shows her also as a powerful dramatist, enacting scenes rooted in very real moments of tension and danger. These shocking stanzas lay bare their speakers' violent psyches, and take poet and reader to new, honest spaces cleared of niceties and decorum. In sequences of poems, Szporluk acknowledges and explores the dissonance of art and love, in narrow, unruly lines that are disarmingly direct, except the direction is towards a kind of madness. It's a relentless and overwhelming lyricism, persuasive and unforgettable.--Ed Skoog

Virginals

Burnside Review Pr

Take Three Poets
Take Thomas Sayers Ellis: Ellis's fractured syntax, his spasmodic, staccato utterance suggest a defiant sensibility. Indeed, at the center of Ellis's work is the figure of an aggressive father, taunting his son into song. Thomas Sayers Ellis was a founding member of Boston's Dark Room Collective and coeditor of AGNI's successful poetry anthology, On the Verge
Take Larissa Szporluk: This poet stalks a landscape that is humid, stylized, Southern. The poet Gregory Orr says of her work: "Faced with such rending beauty, such ravished lucidity, all we can do is stand back and gaze with gratitude and awe." Larissa Szporluk studied at the Iows Writers' Workshop, has taught at Bowling Green State University, and now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Take Joe Osterhaus: Unabashedly intellectual and demanding, Osterhaus's verse displays a rare elegance. According to David St. John, "these precise meditations are dazzling for their ability to touch the seemingly ordinary moments of a life and find in them the materials of both miracle and change." Joe Osterhaus has published in such places as the Antioch Review, the Boston Review, and the Nebraska Review, and he currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Edited by Askold Melnyczuk and the poetry panel of AGNI magazine, Take Three is the first in an important annual series designed to launch the work of new poets.

Take Three: Agni New Poets Series: 1 (The Agni New Poets Series , No 1)

Ellis, Thomas Sayers

Osterhaus, Joe

Graywolf Press

Haunting and spare, The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind is obsessed with fate’s fickle nature. Propelled by internal rhyme, these lyric poems draw on fairy tales and fables, stories from the Bible and from Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, their characters blown hither and thither by mythic winds—but -inevitably, toward an awareness of mortality.
Inside the Dog-Fish
Wide as the church, the sea, the cavern, hard as a rock, a tree, a geyser, tight as the spot of birth, hot as the furnace, serpent, witch, plain as the ego, primitive, tomb, loose as a swallow’s whirling torso, fiery vertebra—madre terribile, mother of agony, atony, urge, providing a passage, a sabbath, excuse, symbol of charm gone darkly sour, emotional windbag pricked by the light of the luna cornuta, spitting up trinkets and bottles of rum, and pages of books, and chunks of men. 
"Mark Strand describes Edward Hopper’s work as being informed by two imperatives, one that urges us to continue and the other that compels us to stay. Such is the experience of reading The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind, Larissa Szporluk’s demanding and brilliant new book: we are both urged -forward and held back by its mysterious intellection. -Szporluk’s work is about meaning: what can be known and what cannot be, what can be divulged and what must be withheld. The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind is fraught with such taut pleasures. This is poetry both luscious and rigorous."—Lynn Emanuel

The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind

Alice James Books

This is poetry both luscious and rigorous.-Lynn EmanuelThis latest collection from the young but already established luminary Larissa Szporluk is cause for celebration. Szporluk has proven once again that she not only deserves her elevated status in the poetry world, but reinvents and advances it with each new collection.This is spare, sly, seductive, and haunting poetry that resonates long after the rustle of the page. Szporluk has an uncanny ability to hone her words until their edges slice like small, deep paper cuts, whittling away at the human experience, searching for the truth of things.Despite her three previously published-and much heralded-works, this visionary poet continues to innovate. She remains completely unpredictable, as if these visceral poems lead her to extraordinary places of their own volition. She writes of mother-son relationships, political and social events-always with an underlying mythic aspect, and always demonstrating an undeniable faith in the human spirit.

Embryos and Idiots

Tupelo Press

Poetry. A buffeting sequence of dramatic monologues that provoke and disturb, Larissa Szporluk's TRAFFIC WITH MACBETH evokes a dark world linked to the black magic of Shakespeare's tortured Scottish assassin, usurper of kings. Baroque in their sweep of high style and low slang, melody and dissonance, these poems use shifting animate and inanimate speakers and surrealist leaps to convey human brutality, the vulnerability of women and children, madness, and the struggle to escape the limitations of this world. "Larissa Szporluk is no coward soul, and her poems have always taken dark, unflinching, daring risks, thematically and linguistically. The turf of TRAFFIC WITH MACBETH is part heartland noir, part merciless domestic surreality, part fabular theater.... This book does 'mouth honor' to the entire spectacle of 'come what may,' from the 'blood at war / within a self' to the 'ghost-waves' of whatever music we can make of even our most brutal hours"—Lisa Russ Spaar.

Traffic with Macbeth (Tupelo Masters Series)

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