"Lisa Jarnot . . . suggests that Language Poetry may be mutating, back to the modernism of Stein and Joyce, having been permanently inflected (or deflected) by a late twentieth-century sharpness and exasperation. . . . These are haunting, perplexing narratives of the inenarrable."?John Ashbery, The Times Literary Supplement
"Her best effects arrive as you zoom headlong right through her high-energy tangle of dissociation . . . in a particle accelerator where connective sense is bombarded by shards of broken grammar."?Albert Mobilio, The Village Voice
Inspired by the Beats, Black Mountain, and the New York School, Lisa Jarnot emerged in the 1990s as one of the foremost poets of the post-Language avant-garde. Joie de Vivre draws on twenty years of work, from the bold fragmentation of her mixed media debut Some Other Kind of Mission to the experimental lyricism of her recent Night Scenes. Following the poet's evolution through her engagements with form and music, Joie de Vivre showcases Jarnot's restless virtuosity and relentless curiosity. The archaic, the surreal, the pastoral, the political?no register of language proves too recalcitrant for her expansive sense of song.
Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1967, Lisa Jarnot studied with Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo and later earned an MFA at Brown University. The author of four full-length poetry collections and the former editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter, she has also just published Robert Duncan: The Ambassador From Venus (University of California Press, 2012), the definitive biography of the San Francisco poet. Since the mid-1990s, she has lived in New York City.
Industry Reviews
"Lisa Jarnot's book of joy raises joy in return. It is a poetry of lyric finesse and emotional daring, a rollicking vision of violet skies and walk-along streets, with the walker shamelessly in wonder but--yo!--cagily of the streets."--Aaron Shurin "Joie de Vivre rings out with troubled beauty, ancient lastingness, and a wild lyricism that shares as much with Johnny Cash as with Gertrude Stein and loves Homer even when it thinks like Abbie Hoffman. This work sets the house of American poetry on fire."--Elizabeth Willis "These always strongly oral poems that cry out from the page in sequences that veer between pure whimsy within a spoken word sensibility approach and often surpass art song territory. The crescendo resolution is felt in the extended 'Amedillin Cooperative Nosegay' where the expanse of her well-earned landscape becomes a realized space in proper necessity for the scope of her delightfully unpredictable poetic."--David Henderson "Jarnot's poetry continues to resonate because--after the experimentation and language play--her poems still burst both with feeling and beauty... Jarnot finds a way to capture a moment of emotional intensity with and in language, while simultaneously letting that moment retain the mystery and the wonder which it produces."--Joshua Ware, Vouched Books "There's a pop-Romanticism, American to the core, behind the majority of Jarnot's most easily enjoyable verse ... These poems orbit day to day reality on paths based off non sequiturs and randy loop de loops."--Patrick-James-Dunagan, The Rumpus "Lisa Jarnot possesses both the raw lyrical pathos of Johnny Cash and the complex stylistics of Gertrude Stein ..."--Mike Sonksen, KCET
