Lisa Olstein's third collection reverberates with twinned realities: wonder and terror, beauty and difficulty, celebration and lament. Through encounters with science, war, art, animals, and motherhood, "Little Stranger "explores the exigencies of close attention, the tenuousness of attachment, and the ever more rapidly shifting nature of knowledge. Intimate lyrics, elegies, and narratives speak in voices familiar yet strange.

Lisa Olstein's debut collection of poetry, "Radio Crackling," "Radio Gone" (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), won the Hayden Carruth Award, and her second volume, "Lost Alphabet" (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), was named a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" by "Library Journal." She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

"This poet brings a sparkling consciousness to the page and an exciting new voice to American poetry."--"Library Journal"

"Most appealing is Olstein's sensitive, quietly pained and earnest tone, w hich, more than the unusual subject, is the real star of this book."--"Publishers Weekly, "starred review

In Lisa Olstein's daring new book, an unnamed lepidopterist--living in a hut on the edge of an unnamed village--is drawn ever deeper into the engrossing world of moths, light, and seeing. Structured as a naturalist's notebook, the four-part sequence of prose poems create a layered pilgrimage into the consequences of intensive study, the trials of being an outsider, and the process of metamorphosis. In an interview, Olstein once said, "I don't want poetry to limit itself to reflecting or recapitulating experience; I want it to "be" an experience."

"I have learned to peer at specimens through a small crack at the center of my fist. It's a habit herders use for distance: vision is concentrated, the crude tunnel brings into focus whatever small expanse lies on the other side, something in the narrowing magnifies what remains. At the table, my hand tires of clenching, my left eye of closing, my right of its squint, but the effect: a blurred carpet of wing becomes a careful weave of eyelashes colored, curved, exquisitely laid . . ."

Lisa Olstein is the author of the Hayden Carruth Award-winning volume "Radio Crackling, Radio Gone." She earned her MFA from the University of Massachusetts and directs the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action in Amherst, Massachusetts.

"A fascinating, totally seductive read!" -Eula Biss, author of Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays and On Immunity: An Inoculation "A book built of brain and nerve and blood and heart. . . . Irreverent and astute. . . . Pain Studies will change how you think about living with a body." -Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck and Bowlaway "A thrilling investigation into pain, language, and Olstein's own exile from what Woolf called 'the army of the upright.' On a search path through art, science, poetry, and prime-time television, Olstein aims her knife-bright compassion at the very thing we're all running from. Pain Studies is a masterpiece." -Leni Zumas, author of The Listeners and Red Clocks In this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraine to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain-how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie's portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visual art, rock lyrics, and field notes from her own medical adventures (both mainstream and alternative), she finds a way to express the often-indescribable experience of living with pain. Eschewing simple epiphanies, Olstein instead gives us a new language to contemplate and empathize with a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Lisa Olstein teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of four poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press. Pain Studies is her first book of creative nonfiction.

Winner of the Hayden Carruth Award "Radio Crackling, Radio Gone" is a debut collection of poetry that explores multiple logics of perception, association, and interpretation. Navigating the edges where things begin to disappear, the poems inhabit border zones of transformation where memory slides into imagination, wakefulness meets sleep, and things possessed become lost.

"What seemed a mystery was""
""in fact a choice. Insert bird for sorrow.""
""What seemed a memory was in fact""
""a dividing line. Insert bird for wind.""
""Insert wind for departure when""""everyone
is standing still. . ."

"Radio Crackling, Radio Gone" was selected from the 1,200 submissions to the Hayden Carruth Award. By the time the anonymous manuscript was chosen as winner, the cover sheet was filled with readers' commentary: "stunning" and "lovely" and a bold "YES "