One Big Time

By Lisa Fishman

• Description
• Reviews

• Lisa Fishman’s latest collection, One Big Time, is a one-woman quest narrative in a kayak, written during the author’s “journey-in-place” in Northeastern Ontario over a period of fourteen days in quarantine.

  Here is Fishman at her most exacting and exploratory, in poems that hew with lyric precision to the immediate physical and geologic environment. At the same time, language is an alert, mobile life-form in active investigation of what one thinks one understands, and of where one thinks one is. While the narrator searches daily for a passageway from one body of water into another, words live in other words (“the hemlock / is a he / today”), and acrostics are illuminations: s-w-i-m is “sleek widening instant’s magnet.” Surprised by joy, these biocentric poems offer a way of being in the world with wonder and rigor––attentive enough to be lost, unknowing enough to be changed.

• 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