Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. RETURN FROM ELSEWHERE is the co-winner of the competition for the 2014 Outriders Poetry Selection. The volume contains over fifty short poems ranging, in the words of critic Gabriel Levin, through seemingly irreconcilable polarities: faith and betrayal, confession, secrecy, risk and failure [as well as] desire--licit and illicit. The book concludes with Porous, a long poem-sequence.
Linda Zisquit writes like a dream--a dream of love, or death, or God. Her lyricism is pure and spotless...Disciplined in form, elegant in utterance, fearless in self- scrutiny, these are works of profound--can I say noble? --beauty...RETURN FROM ELSEWHERE is Zisquit's most brilliant book yet.--Alicia Ostriker
Ever since her first collection Ritual Bath, Linda Zisquit has wrested her tensile, lyric poems out of seemingly irreconcilable polarities: faith and betrayal, confession, secrecy, risk and failure. Now, in her fifth collection, desire--licit and illicit love--is evoked through the sifting of memory in the extended sequence, Porous, its ruptured, centrifugal narrative seeking release from loss and regret; and in her cantilevered ghazals, the medieval Persian form's yoking of the sacred and the profane is perfectly suited to the poet's self- interrogation and probing of Biblical lore.--Gabriel Levin.
If we ever doubted Linda Stern Zisquit's unique significance among English- language poets, Porous finally unites her with the author of the Biblical Song of Songs. A love--the love--is lost, but found again in the porousness of memory, just as the lost love of the Bible--the Creator Himself--responds to the soul of the poet-lover. [In the book's short poems and ghazals] there are quietly dramatic queries between nature or city, reaching back for wholeness to her maiden name/life. Throughout RETURN FROM ELSEWHERE, Zisquit forces us to contemplate what a Biblical poet writing in a Jerusalem today would be up against. It's exhilarating, restorative, and irreplaceable.--David Rosenberg.
