$16.95

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ISBN: 978-1-62557-812-9
Categories Poetry

tether

Publication Date: March 2020

Description

Listen to Lisa Fay Coutley read poems from tether // Watch the captioned video on the BLP YouTube Channel

Praise

In tether, a spacecraft of a book superbly conceived and assembled, Lisa Fay Coutley engineers both recovery and healing in poems that swerve emotionally between the landing bays of grief, longing, and wonder. A bright hunger constellates around these poems, but so too the immensities of love. Tether is a burning inquiry into the miracle of being here on earth and what keeps us fastened to each other, for better or worse. 

-Major Jackson

Lisa Fay Coutley’s tether is characterized by a compressed tension, each line, each word, hitched to the next, quivering with the effort to remain connected and with the opposing desire to be released. The image of the tether accrues intensity in the course of the book: astronaut tethered to the ship, poet to the poem, mother to the homeless, addict child and child to the mother, and in the space between “the two / great opposing poles” is God, who learns, in that chasm, “wonder &suffering.” Indeed, oppositional forces reign in these poems; there are no conventional false resolutions to be had. “Every event / that’s saved my life has nearly killed me the speaker declares, and “I would rather live / with my burning than sleep with my dead.” This is a far-reaching book, a political book, a deeply personal and heroic book. Its thesis is reflected in its enviably honed diction. “Mystery is her / bitch the speaker writes of the eclipsing sun. The same is true of Lisa Fay Coutley and the ravishing poems of tether.

-Diane Seuss

Tether is a book of distances and intimacies, of letters never sent and dream talks and delayed communiques, It is a study of distance between us,between an astronaut and a poet, between lovers, between ourselves and each other, ourselves and ourselves. “We are the beached boat / with a hole in its hull admits the poet. Each of us, even as “baby in a womb is a cloud.” And yet there is so much love. And yet, everything that happens to us, happens for a purpose. And when one turns worthy, a giant squid washes ashore.It is this knowing, this insight into our distances (of years, of geography, ofa space of a single day) here that I find compelling: “& how far / must you back away / from yourself / to see / yourself / as the Astronaut / sees/Earth.” Beautiful work.

-Ilya Kaminsky

,Just over a full column of definitions for “tether” in the OED, among which are those that suggest diametrically opposite forms of fastening. It’s fascinating to read through them, but not nearly so compelling as it is to read the poems in Lisa Fay Coutley’s tether. We are tied, ensnared, and attached-in an especially intimate sense of that word-to everything that matters, which Coutley knows and makes us see and, in the richest sense of this word, feel. This is a superb book of poems.

-Robert Wrigley

Is it desire, wonder, duty, or memory that keeps us most firmly tethered to the world, where “truth is every bird starving and we live in constant awareness of all the forces that threaten to break the bonds between us and our loved ones? A mother’s death, a son’s drug addiction, the disastrous world news filtered daily through the internet: how do we reconcile the painful events that define our existence with our hope for a more secure future? Through sinewy, sometimes hallucinogenic syntax that threatens to (but never does) spin out of control, tether’s poems examine a contemporary and very human paradox, in which we long to absent ourselves from our grief, while also needing to document our losses so as to ensure we won’t forget. tether reminds us that we are formed as much from pain as from delight and that, in her ability to look back upon her past, upon today’s terrible and compelling news, the contemporary poet is like an astronaut, able to regard the world “from a great height a witness to what most of us cannot bear to see.
 
-Paisley Rekdal

About the Author

© Randy Mattley

Lisa Fay Coutley

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of HOST (Wisconsin Poetry Series, forthcoming 2024), tether (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois University, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, and Small Girl: Micromemoirs (Harbor Editions, forthcoming 2024). She is also the editor of the grief anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (BLP, 2024). Her poetry has been awarded an NEA Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, chosen by Dana Levin, and the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Recent prose & poetry appears in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Barrelhouse, Brevity, Copper Nickel, North American Review, and Gulf Coast. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry & CNF in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

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