LISA RHOADES

SAINT JULIAN PRESS POET

 
Lisa Rhoades grew up in the Midwest and now lives in New York City. She holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and was a Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is the author of Strange Gravity, selected by Elaine Terranova for the Bright Hill Press Poetry Award Series and published in 2004. A chapbook, Into Grace, was published by Riverstone Press in 2003. Her work has been published in such journals as The Bellingham Review, Chelsea, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Saranac Review, and Smartish Pace. Before becoming a nurse, she taught at CUNY College of Staten Island, Rutgers University, and as Visiting Poet through Poets and Writers Poetry in the Branches and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. She lives on Staten Island with her spouse and their two children. Visit her Amazon author page at: amazon.com/author/lisarhoades and meet her at http://lisarhoades.com.
 

THE LONG GRASS

The poetry of a feminist woman of faith, The Long Grass counters the losses endemic to our broken lives—beset by climate change, childhood abuse, gender stereotype and inequity, death itself—with the reassuring persistence of the natural world and the enduring promise of human love. The collection reveals an urban landscape by way of its fecund gaps and the corresponding moments of connection between a daughter and her mother. “The long grass is mown but not yet raked,” the title poem says, invoking Whitman’s graves of cut grass, but highlighting not just the scythe to come but the chastisement we experience throughout life. Rhoades is equally adept at ecstatic odes, full of word play and joy, that deepen these complicated looks at our crowded existences. “In the bright world” of the twenty-first century, the goddess, Demeter, commutes on the Staten Island Ferry in a sequence plaited through the collection reminding us of the lively gods we are and all that we cannot be. In a voice at once calm and urgent, The Long Grasssings in the haunting psalms of our difficult days.