"Haste is full of carefully wrought, surprisingly imagined poems. Vivid and intense, each one creates a geography as familiar as a lighted house on a snowy evening or a summer lightning storm. Bickmore invests her poetry with images of desire and loss, extravagance and longing, and reminds us how original and strange is the most daily of experiences."
––Susan Elizabeth Howe, author of Salt
From a life of meditation and memory, legend and language, Lisa Bickmore probes in poems intimate yet inclusive the dark spaces of experience where figures align, collapse, and realign. This second edition contains a new foreword by the author.
Excerpt
Happiness for Abigail
As if it were a reward, somehow, for hope––
It is a useless idea. You find it somewhere
Along the arc that begins at expectation, that
Disappointment ends. If you were to predict
A point on that arc at which it would be likely
To occur, it probably would not be in bed
On a snowy morning, with the milkman's footsteps
Printed on the walk, then turning away; with
The tousled sheets just warm on your legs, your body
Deciding whether to relax into sleep, or gather
To rise; the baby's head turned away from you;
Her every breath under the quilts lifting them
With a shudder, then a sigh. Who would ever dream
Such a moment as one particularly happy?
About the author
Lisa Bickmore is Utah Poet Laureate and Professor Emeritus at Salt Lake Community College, where she was a founder of its Publication Center. Her book of poetry, flicker (2016), won the Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press. Her Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize-winning poem, "Eidolon," appears in her collection, Ephemerist (2017, Red Mountain Press). She is the founder and publisher of the new independent nonprofit, Lightscatter Press. She lives with her husband, John McCormick, in West Jordan.
