Alive With Tension of Desire: Lisa Russ Spaar's Orexia

At LA Review of Books, L. A. Johnson reviews Lisa Russ Spaar's Orexia (Persea Books, 2017), the title of which "comes from the Greek word for 'desire,'" and "is a word more commonly seen in its opposite: 'anorexia.' Spaar’s poems are alive with this tension, the poems are desirous and searching while also aware of desire’s danger," writes Johnson. More from "Even in Windowless Rooms, I See Sky":

Spaar allows the reader to witness her mind at work, her mind in motion. In “Orexic Hour” she writes: “My body, made to be entered / & exited. Almost wrote ‘edited.’ / Eaten. Odd to be so direct.” In these lines, we see how the poet’s mind works in tandem and tension with her body: after beginning with the physical and erotic, she moves to “edited,” which we might understand as either creative or personal withholding, before ending on the notion of “eaten” which implies both consummation and decay. By tracing the iterations of the mind, Spaar opens up associations and new connections. Yet she counters this mental velocity by speaking outright: “Odd to be so direct” — when in fact, she has not been direct at all; her language has carried us to the sea of the possible, where we float in a current of language and image.

Sometimes the poet’s thinking mind is so overcome with ideas, with emotions and descriptions, it disintegrates in the most surprising ways. In many of the poems that address death and loss, we see the mind turn into fragments. In “Temple Tomb”: “I am garden. Am before. / Asleep. Then the changes:” and in “The Whales”: “They placental. They / in four-chambered beyonding.” At other points, the syntax seems to completely break down, and the lyric leaves out some anticipated word. In “Mynddaeg Hour,” in which Spaar explores a waning life and year, the couplets build up before seeming to shatter: “That voltage. How not die?” Here, the mind cannot quite ask, “how do we not die,” but instead asks, how do we avoid ending?

Please read on at LARB.