"Inseparable" collects poems written between 1995 and 2005 by the New York poet, editor and novelist Lewis Warsh. Strongly identified with New York since the 1960s, when he co-founded "Angel Hair" magazine with Anne Waldman, Warsh makes poems from the city's linguistic fabric, interwoven with a bemused real-time interiority. The 35 poems of this collection are pitted with reminiscences made approachable to the reader by their lack of self-absorption; it is the momentum of the will to persist by means of language--"moving, word by word"--against the incipient flickerings of mortality, that is their real logic. This act of self-propulsion may be subject to doubt ("Can we spend our lives feeding/off simple endurance?"), but it is humbly pursued: Warsh resists the inflated rhetoric such preoccupations usually attract and sticks instead with (in the words of his colleague Clark Coolidge) "confusion, in strict order."

Fiction. Over 20 Years of Stories. "What a pleasure to have all these stories by Lewis Warsh in one volume They tend to be low-key, almost off- hand, but each with a poetic kernel that infects and defuses throughout, which makes them (though it is a critical cliche to say it this way) haunting. But that's what they do. They haunt. That's what the best writing does, often without excessive flashiness or even letting us know, as the narrative drifts through the material from which each is constructed, how it's done. These are extraordinary tales."--Samuel R. Delany"Lewis Warsh's narrative always speaks to itself from a lyric threshold. A postmodern Delmore Schwartz--yearning, mordant, suspenseful."--Gloria Frym "Lewis Warsh moves through the crowded street, a reporter, pad in hand and pencil behind ear. The sentences hold the simple truths of his heart. That amidst the nearly incomprehensible violence of daily life one reality is a singular desire--love. The purity of love, the essence of love. Recalling the quiet resonance of Salinger, drawing the curtain on the horror of inhumanity, settling down on rumpled sheets, alone or in reach of salvation, Lewis reports with poet- investigator eye that love has come to save the day."--Thurston Moore "The straight-from- the-shoulder idiom that powers Lewis Warsh's writing is a marvel of economy. Evoking memory without nostalgia, moving the reader without sentimentality, the stories in ONE FOOT OUT THE DOOR are lucid, formally adventurous, and emotionally complex. Like Stephen Dixon and Leonard Michaels, two other masters of plainspoken cosmopolitanism and rueful reflection, Lewis Warsh uses ordinary language as a means to an extraordinary inventiveness."--Christopher Sorrentino

Fiction. "A deeply engrossing book, I couldn't put it down. And now that I've finished reading it, I can't put it away, for how it furthers my thinking of the genre itself. A PLACE IN THE SUN beautifully combines the high action and salaciousness of page-turners, with the self-reflection and risk-taking of postmodern fiction. It's a must-read and a must-study"--Renee Gladman. "A PLACE IN THE SUN is a beautifully rendered and expertly deconstructed novel. Warsh's stunningly effective use of multiple narratives, provided in exquisitely detailed lines, conveys an elastic and powerful emotional honesty. This is a sensual and desperate story from a writer with formidable powers of invention"--Donald Breckenridge.

Fiction. Billie is a Senior at East Winston High when she tutors Ted, the star of the basketball team. But Ted has a drinking problem. He also has a minor fetish, a request that leads Billie on avicarious search for herself through the characters in the books she loves to "plow through."But Billie's new sexual awareness takes her far beyond Ted, into the lives of East Winston'stroubled, suburban angst, where, for one early 1980's school season, she learns the differencebetween a storied life and reality. "The heroine is a hoops-shooting, Madame Bovary-reading American kid trying to figure it all out. As we follow Billie in and out of love, limning with her the edges of despair and hope, Warsh leadsus deep into the 'hum of human machinery, ' a territory where all but essentials are weeded out.Part bildungsroman, part commentary on American life in the 80s, TED'S FAVORITE SKIRT is atrenchant, lovely wonder"--Laird Hunt. Other Lewis Warsh titles available from SPD include INSEPARABLE: POEMS 1995-2005, THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD, TOUCH OF THE WHIP, and MONEY UNDER THE TABLE. He is at present on the faculty of Long Island University in Brooklyn