Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition

By Lisa Fishman
Publication Date: August 4, 2020

ISBN# 9781950268061 (7x9, 208pp, paperback)
ISBN# 9781950268078 (7x9, 208pp, limited edition hardcover)

Spanning 16 years of notebooks, teaching notes, and improvisations, Lisa Fishman's Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition upends time itself in lyric, prose, and visual forms. Sharing Paul Klee's intuition that "the eye travels along the path cut out for it in the work," this deeply multifaceted book moves between observational directness and maddened speech, places and persons, humor and alarm. Tempted by Laura Riding's renunciation of poetry yet rich with life-forms of all kinds (vegetable, animal, processual), it is a work of immediate presence and continuous change, enacting an ever-renewing ecology of connection.
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Lisa Fishman is the author of Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, forthcoming 2020), 24 Pages and other poems (Wave, 2015), F L O W E R C A R T (Ahsahta Press, 2011), Current (Parlor Press, 2011) and The Happiness Experiment (Ahsahta, 2009). A North American writer (US and Canadian), Fishman is working on dividing her time between Wisconsin, where she currently lives, and somewhere across the border.