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.
Praise for Lisa Jarnot:
"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, 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, Village Voice
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