One Big Time

Lisa Fishman's newest collection of poems from Wave Books, One Big Time, is a lyric wayfinding. Its sections are titled by dates ranging from July 10-July 24 2020 when the speaker is trying to orient herself in a nature that constantly turns her about, never quite revealing itself or its origins. The point of this excellent volume is [. . .] action and the labor of understanding.
CM Burroughs, author of Master Suffering (Tupelo Press, 2020)]

Fishman's mystical experience is a grounded one - literally so, as she discovers that bare feet may make for a more profound connection than sexuality: "I used to think it was eros / but no shoes gets you closer / than no clothes" - but still a revelation, the way departures or interruptions in routine often open doors for us.
Paul Scott Stanfield,Hong Kong Review of Books

This experience is part of the resonant pleasure of reading this books: the pacing is like leaf shadows pointing back to the living self you experience without needing to perceive it "clearly": the unfilled framing has space for you and other creatures (the first page's first word is "you"). The ordinariness of the language is part of that fit.
Lisa Samuels,Poetry Salzburg Review

There’s a calm to this collection, even with the framing, the background, of uncertainty across that first Covid-era summer. There’s also something quite graceful to the subtleties of a smaller collection—the poems themselves take up but thirty of the fifty-six pages of this published book, allowing for a great deal of open space, which I very much appreciate here, and seems a smart and deliberate design-response to the requirements of the poems—one fully aware of the lyric geographies she moves through.
Rob McLennan