Books by Lisa Alexander
throttlebody
from Get Fresh Books Publishing
The poems in Lisa Alexander’s debut collection, throttlebody, operate like the mechanism that gives the collection its name — they navigate the tension of an idling engine and the wildness of a wide-open throttle. Her steady-eyed speaker allows the reader to leap from the tangible to the intangible as she explores the risks and celebrations of experimentation. Alexander writes, “My body counts on the sound of water / in the mouth, the brush of lips / grazing the phone receiver / to be reminded that it is more echo than matter.” This collection does not shy away from illuminating the speaker’s vulnerable and imperfect investigations. Rather, throttlebody looks head-on at an uncertain world and leaves room for it to expose its own faults as well as its redemptions.
Few books I’ve read feel so much like they are spoken to me by a friend, someone telling me secrets, maybe in a car, or to the side of a dance floor that we’re shy to get on, or on a long drive through the hills of a city she’s showing me the nooks of. Or on a meandering walk that I really don’t want to end. Hurt, heartbroken, dreamy, yearning, funny, tough. And in the true beautiful music of a voice I love, and love more the more I listen to, and could listen to forever.
—Ross Gay, author of eight books of prose and poetry, most recently Inciting Joy: Essays
I love, and can’t stop thinking about, the eye-mind that pulses this remarkable debut. Alexander flies through furnace grates and bird paths, camping tents and back streets, Eros’s siren-coils and death’s deep bunkers—and slips out onto unfamiliar dimensions. No theatrics required. Her dreams and lovers’ trysts arrive through the eye’s iris, the “mechanic,” so utterly present you might lose your balance and miss her undergirding craft. Many poems in this book mark a real contribution to American surrealism, in passages filled with an architecture that can pull a train from its track and catapult it into the sky; or a nation, not merely “haunted,” but “occupied, as “We live[d] on the inside/of someone else’s body.” I will recommend this book again and again.
—Judith Vollmer, author of six books of poetry, including, most recently, THE SOUND BOAT: New and Selected Poems, University of Wisconsin Press Four Lakes Prize, 2022
In throttlebody, the life of the mouth is primary: My body counts on the sound of water in the mouth... These wholly original poems slip through time with wild sensual metaphor, from the Camaro bucket seat to the visceral life of the tiny fan, the Hemi Cuda; from the top/bottom lip to the bird-shaped birds to fish swimming inside the body. Alexander talks to the dead, who breathe in lines of stunning imagination—these poems are fuel-injected, running hot, alive.
—Jan Beatty, author of The Body Wars, University of Pittsburgh Press
I'm excited to tell you about how good Lisa Alexander's poems are, and what a welcome breath of fresh air her book, throttlebody brings to contemporary American poetry. These poems are smart, funny, insightful, sexy as hell for the way they sizzle with sensuous detail, and they have that rare ability to draw us into surprising, other realms. The poet understands the way that domesticity can be beautiful if you look closely enough, and her clear-headed and unsentimental take on the working class, including the literal and figurative landscapes of that world feels personal. In fact, the emotional range of the poems is inclusive, even sometimes painfully so. I love this book. I hope you'll read it.
—Bruce Weigl, author of On the Shores of Welcome Home, winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award