The poems in "Paradise for Everyone" transact embrained feeling and transform, via belief, possibilities of reference. Here, and here, the person becomes language, and language is an actor fully fleshed, whose words and bodies name and rearrange the poem's conditions. The book's sections are organized to suggest movement, not so much a narrative or progress as a cycling through of events, of compulsion, vision, desire, ruin, multiplicity. Each poem has an ongoing urge to self-difference as it dreams, travels, and exchanges attributes with locales and objects. That urge generates the intermingling of self and word in this particular paradise, language here on earth. Lisa Samuels teaches literature, poetic theory, and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition to poetry, she has published essays and edited work on modernist and contemporary writers, on intellectual property issues in the humanities, and on practices of literary criticism.

Livestream is digital capture thrown elsewhere, body fluids that charge being, and planetary liquid flows. Livestream’s poetry entangles with those phenomena. The poems erupt, stagger, hold, and reflect as they evoke events and responses distributed through bodies and ethical borders. How language conjures us, and how we sense (with) it, is Livestream’s constant ecology. The photographs are resonators, and witnesses.

'A moment in fast-forward and in fast-reverse, a moment suspended and dilating, a moment gathering into physical thought, thought open to the inrush of percepts time orchestrates as feeling and disperses into a fading mood: a moment's invention of the one who sees, the one who reads, that one a passenger of the moment, one among many, or in another's dream that passes through, passes along. This book is transporting. It thinks into every connective, with every connective tensed between forward movement and the desire to stay put and opening. Again, fast and slow, Lisa Samuels is a poet of time, and we are fortunate to have her time through this beautiful book.' - John Wilkinson

Poetry. This poetry unhinges the sensible cultural body and activates other oscillations of the sensible, which chime with acts of love and political subjects resuturing what are given to be facts. The poems are verbal machineries of encounter, brain music in relational life."Lisa Samuels's WILD DIALECTICS forges imaginary rhythms into speculative anthems. These lyrics of elusive logos ghost provisional conditions of enduring transience. With stunning poise, Samuels holds out for holding on to the inherent insistence of words' translucent pilgrimage."--Charles Bernstein

Gender City is in our skins, in the law, in our names (like Trudi and Terra), in places like the Barbie Doll Museum, in events like falling on the sidewalk, being in prison in a city with buildings made of skin, rupturing murder in language (pure meaning's urge), considering language as tattoo in a city with mouths that manifest like a disgorgement in your gender, in the city that has no center as the tattoo of poetry (the skin under your dress) has no center.

Poetry. TOMORROWLAND is a book-length poem of bodily transit and colonial forgetting. Its names and events perpetually arrive in a new world, whose versions here combine promised lands and historical suicide. Eula moves among these real and imagined place-times with other symbolic names and unnamed figures, and Jack plays death. The primary formal note is the interrupted iambic. "Lisa Samuels' TOMORROWLAND is a guidebook and diary from an actuality existing among real sea and ships and coastline, history, and contemporary reflection. There are named 'characters, ' but the true characters are a colony, a "we" of the newly arrived to this land. The generous and graceful syntax is a fusing agent for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The reader exults in the accomplishment of the verse"--Alice Notley

Poetry. THE INVENTION OF CULTURE is the third full-length collection of poems by Lisa Samuels, whose second volume, Paradise for Everyone, also appeared with Shearsman. The poems in this new collection mix prosodic syncopation with prose syntax and floating page space, as though the page were not only paper but also skin, film, and musical score inscribed by a languaged body tapping out the news. And there is news here: the strained topicality of the poems is an index of imaginative vision meeting the world's insistence that it be experienced. These poems are stories with many names--parallax histories, present dreams, compound love songs and dirges--whose inhabitable spatial structures are like event horizons that mean to let you come back to the world.

Anarchism is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end of 1925, when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson. Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria. Long out of print and now available for the first time in paperback, this is one of the most imaginative and daring works of literary theory ever written by a modernist figure. Lisa Samuels's edition sets the work in its historical context and elucidates its central intellectual difficulties. Her introduction and notes are a valuable aid to an understanding of Riding's work.