Böcker av Lise Goett

Poems about celestial and mortal bodies. The Radiant explores the psychological, physical, and spiritual challenges of living in a body and the changes and distortions that arise from the experience of the body's limitations and inevitable death. The collection takes its title from the term for the point from which all meteors appear to emanate during a shower, luminous bodies in decay that when traced to their origin seem to converge at a single point. "Perhaps you can remember the time called before, the all-you-can-do-is-see-yourself-in-a-split-second where you recognize that everything you've ever known is going to be different after," writes Goett in the collection's final poem, "The Bookman," recounting radiant points of no return and transformation that, in spite of their challenge, remain luminous.

When the manuscript that became Lise Goett's new book Leprosarium was chosen for the Winner Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, judge Toi Derricotte's citation said, "This is dangerous art, as serious as a heart attack, unsparing mostly of the poet herself, and as intensely rewarding as it is unsettling." Goett's poetry, infused with a bountiful vocabulary, is rife with extravagantly dramatic forms that take in the sweep of western art and religion via relationships between those with power and those who've suffered their commands.