Daywork

“In lyric meditations that dwell as much in grief as on the work of art—from Michelangelo and Raphael to Helen Frankenthaler and Louise Nevelson—Jessica Fisher refutes the underlying violence of everyday life with parables that tell of the ‘deathlessness of art, the ancient / stories once more transformed—.’ Her horizon is as vast as a fresco wall, even if the world can only be measured in what a day can encompass in lines akin to shadows cast from a hundred sources of light. These stunning poems seek to remember what it was like to be a ‘wire once, conductive, mute,’ compelled to make it ‘matter that we were here at the same time, late capital post-industrial.’ The profound tenors of Daywork so ebb and intensify as to unite the sonic and philosophical registers of intimacy; the understanding that because ‘everything was / saying goodbye, that I / should listen more closely.’”

“How stunning this book of poems—exquisitely intimate, philosophical, meticulous, and sensual. Daywork seems to be salvaged from an inner depth, as though written through a mythically long night. Its sensing, gleaming syntax is at once steadfast and veering. I am astonished by the darkness and the candle (both) of Fisher’s gorgeous, singular mind.”

“What are the poet’s responsibilities in regards to witnessing and rendering violence? Arriving, like all of us, in the middle of history, Fisher’s speaker reaches toward the fresco and other forms of art in search, if not of answers, then of language that is alive enough to survive its encounters with grief. It is precisely Fisher’s masterful command over the line that allows Daywork to revel in unruliness and to confront, one frame at a time, the beauty and uncertainty of ‘what it is to be alive now.’”