Talisman

by Lisa C. Krueger

Overview

The poems in Lisa C. Krueger’s Talisman interrogate the everyday expression of complex human emotions. In psychological portraits stunning in their precision, Krueger brings her observational powers to bear on the domestic and its darknesses—childbirth, play, sex, and family picnics, as well as abuse, disability, adultery, and mental illness. We see how intimacy is laced with uncertainty, how the bonds between us can be a form of bondage. Life’s long arc is considered, from the early developmental stages of attachment and individuation to the existential dramas of purpose and meaning in middle and old age. What emerges is a study in the mystery of survival, in how we move beyond the broken places in ourselves. These poems magnify small, everyday redemptions as signs—talismans—of human potential, and ask us to think about our choices, to use language as a force to press against truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597095457
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/15/2014
Edition description:	1
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Lisa C. Krueger is a poet and psychologist. She is the author of two previous books of poetry, Rebloom and animals the size of dreams. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Atlanta Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She has written a series of interactive journals related to psychology and creativity. She maintains a private therapy practice focused on women’s issues, health psychology, writing therapy, and the role of creativity in wellness. She lives in Pasadena, California.

Read an Excerpt

SomeoneMightSee
 
We drank from a spring’s
open sky, its thickness awakening
new thirst. Dense tissues
sustained our weight,
leaf-sweet layers
cushioned our brash reach,
one person touching another
for restoration, for inheritance 
of desire that progressed
in waves of light
through trees, the world
opening its arms.
Get dressed, fire in the sky,
in the spring of water,
all elements undisguised.
We found our clothes then,
went on with our lives.

Table of Contents

I

What She Felt 19

Underpass 20

Girl, I'll House You 21

My Locked Unit Routine 25

Intrepid 26

Delusions Are Hardest to Treat 27

Broken Tail 29

Pre-measured 30

Prodigal 31

Ladies' Night 32

Swap Years 33

Opening the Mouth 34

The Broken 35

The Summer of Fish 36

Saturdays Across the Border 37

Safety 38

The Fighting Ceases 39

Bank Teller 40

Guest Farm Pardon 41

Allotment 42

II

Voracious at Café Literati, Santa Monica 45

Condolence Note at the Kitchen Table 46

Resistance 47

Cross Country 48

Theft 49

Someone Might See 50

Pleasure in Darkness 51

Drought As Desire 52

The Old Story Follows Us 53

Peach Jam 54

Why We Don't Skype 55

History of Clothes 57

Opening to Light 58

Private Lessons 59

Dependence 60

Enclosed 61

III

Once I Loved a Marine 65

Earth Before Blooms 67

The Bargain 68

Because Pam Pulled Weeds After Chemo 70

Last Encore (Concerto Delle Donne) 71

Release 73

Picnic With Separate Cars 74

When We Took Our Time 75

Anywhere 76

Mechanics 77

There Is No Echo 78

Secured Cushions, Beer and Olives 80

Reading in Calabasas 81

My Apparition 82

Remarkable Winds Come to Our Home 84

Not Asking for Much 86

Progeny of a Healer, 130 B.C. 87

Ready for Happiness 88

Signs of Life 89

Talisman 90

Editorial Reviews

“Lisa Krueger writes poetry of otherworldly precision. Her tiniest observations resonate with galvanic force. In this collection, rational thought is turned into exquisite music to invent a kind of new language with which to express the human experience. A cane, a broken tail; flat champagne and a safety pin; everything becomes a talisman—magical, ominous, life-changing. There is hardly a line, let alone a poem, in this collection that isn’t surprising, memorable, and important.”
—Laura Kasischke

“The wisdom and lyric grace in these new poems remind me of all that I have come to love about Lisa C. Krueger’s work. They are quiet, and they hum with precision, like exquisite engines. But they are quick, darting, capable of astounding leaps; they lift off from one place and land in another, and suddenly I realize that I have traveled a great distance upon or within them. Yes, this is the deft and moving work of a poet who has discovered how to coax and unravel the mystery within the everyday. But Talisman also represents a furthering or deepening of Krueger’s poetic agency. She is writing with even greater fearlessness, candor and wit about what it means to be human, to live subject to love, memory, desire, and regret. These poems give me heart. Very often in their lines, I feel ‘the world / opening its arms.’”
—Tracy K. Smith

“Talisman is a book that begins in tragedy but ends by evoking a strange and secret joy. In between are the formal constraints life brings. Lisa Krueger mirrors these constraints with poems that move inside their own formal considerations with both assurance and amazement. What a pleasure.”
—Jim Moore

“In the first poem of Lisa Krueger’s Talisman, a metal halo is attached to the skull of the poet’s sister, who is thus transformed into a kind of wounded angel, the first of many tutelary spirits whose suffering and strength give this book an unusually profound emotional depth. Krueger’s poems oscillate between life’s grave dualities: sickness and health, marriage and infidelity, loyalty and betrayal. There is no pleasure without a corresponding measure of pain in her poems, where life is balanced on an often-cruel indeterminacy. Her sister’s devastating injury, her daughter’s illness and her mother’s death, are balanced against the birth of her children, and her children’s children, but Krueger is too serious a poet to succumb to an easy reckoning. Her poems do not offer the consolation of a contrived resolution, but they do give us an opportunity to ‘glory in the waste of the world.’”
—Gary Young

From the Publisher