Contemporary Authors

• The Fix: Poems University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 2018

• Lisa Wells website - http://lisawellswriter.com/

  Lisa Wells is a poet and nonfiction writer from Portland, Oregon. Her debut collection of poetry, THE FIX, was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2017 Iowa Poetry Prize. A short essay about the book can be found at the Poetry Society of America, and a review can be read Publisher’s Weekly.
  A new book of nonfiction, Believers, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The Believer, N+1 online, The Iowa Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly and elsewhere, and has been recognized with grants and fellowships from Caldera Arts, The Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, among others. She lives with the poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson in Seattle and Tucson where they edit The Volta, and run a small press called Letter Machine Editions. She currently teaches poetry at The Hugo House and The Arizona Poetry Center.
  After dropping out of the 10th grade, Wells worked a variety of jobs for fifteen years, before receiving a BFA in Writing from Goddard College, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s taught poetry and nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Arizona, and Yale-NUS College where she was an Emerging Writer in Residence. Additional biographical trivia can be gleaned from interviews at Guernica and The Rumpus.

• Guernica - https://www.guernicamag.com/lisa-wells-tapering-of-extremes/

  May 22, 2018
  Lisa Wells: Tapering of Extremes
  The writer reflects on the beef between poets, enjoying every day miracles, and practicing selfless listening.
  By Michael Juliani

  Share
  Tweet
  E-mail

  By Jaclyn Campanaro.
  Lisa Wells is a poet of dark and harrowing lyrical power, whose first book, The Fix, won the 2017 Iowa Poetry Prize and was just released in April 2018. The poems in The Fix drift across the barrier between oblivion and insight, a mutable boundary that is explored as deeply in the poems’ chronicles of punk-scene tragedies, defeated relationships and intoxication as in the tension of their finely wrought forms. Wells shies away neither from the bitterness of bewilderment nor the sorrow of reaching beyond one’s own invulnerability. Rather than positing a static sense of serenity, The Fix thrives on this bone-deep distress.
  Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Wells is also an essayist, with a nonfiction book, Believers, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2019. Encountering Wells’ range of poems, essays, interviews, podcast appearances and captivating reading style (documented on YouTube) spurs the conviction that the subtle miracles of the mind and body are enough to sustain faith in a literary life. I spoke to Wells by phone from opposite coasts of the country, using the occasion of her debut poetry collection to address some of the far-reaching impressions her work has made on me.
  —Michael Juliani for Guernica
  Guernica: How and when did you start putting this book together?
  Lisa Wells: I would say, seventy percent of the book was written in grad school, but a few of the poems are as much as ten years old. I have a somewhat unconventional background in that I dropped out of high school and I worked odd jobs for thirteen years before I returned to school—so a couple of the poems were written before I was even an undergrad. Otherwise, my story is pretty typical. I started sending it out, I’d get rejected, I was writing new poems and cycling them in. It started to gain some traction. You know, you’re a semifinalist, then a finalist…same thing everyone tells you: it’s a matter of time. Which can either be comforting to hear, or annoying, depending on your mood.
  I had sort of made my peace with the idea that it might not become a book. I’d gained enough distance that I could see what it would be like to read as a judge. It didn’t seem likely that someone would choose it, because it’s so violent and grief-stricken. Whatever revelations it has to offer aren’t exactly soothing.
  Guernica: The book reckons with the fact of life that is the loss of transformative elements or of that space where you think nothing will sublimate, transform, or become beautiful.
  Lisa Wells: You can talk about it on a couple of levels. You can talk about the struggle of the poet—or the “speaker,” as they say—through the poems. And you can talk about the way the form performs that dialectic, how the poem struggles against its own strictures, and develops but doesn’t necessarily find rest or release. Like life. The cliché is the dark night of the soul, but that’s what many of the poems record, a place that very much resists easy comfort or the facile epiphanies that used to satisfy, and that became impossible.
  Guernica: Nick Flynn, I think, said that with his poetry, he brings people into the dark and then leaves them there.
  Lisa Wells: That’s refreshing.
  I don’t want to come off as Goth, I just think our overvaluation of the light results from a shallow engagement with the spectrum—the categories are ultimately bullshit, but a general refusal to contend with the unseemly aspects of self is one reason the world is so messed up.
  Guernica: You’re one in a minority of poets whose reading style I really enjoy. Don’t let me put this on you, but it seems like you actually enjoy reading poems aloud. I hear from a lot of people that their least favorite part of being a poet is having to do readings, and I always think that’s kind of a shame.
  Lisa Wells: My first training was in theater, but I developed stage fright in my early twenties and had to give it up. All my favorite plays to perform were more literary and probably terrible to watch. Already, I was more turned on by language than I was by performing, but when you spend a lot of your time thinking about bodies in shared space and how you might use the stage—and look, you’re not going to please everyone, some people prefer a flat delivery—it’s hard to forget that training.
  When I was a kid going to wannabe Beat poetry open mics, where everybody’s kind of doing this pantomime, wearing berets and stuff—the work wasn’t all that good, but enthusiasm was high, and people had an interest in entertaining one another. Later, among formally trained poets, I twigged to the shift in expectation. There’s a lot of self-consciousness, not wanting to sound like a blowhard, etcetera—but I don’t think it’s all false humility. There’s a sense that you want to be sufficiently humble because your work is in conversation with the dead, as opposed to the other sixteen-year-olds who also worship Saul Williams. I respect that impulse, but no doubt it makes for a more funereal affair. Obviously, there are a lot of exceptions.
  Guernica: It’s interesting to think of “page poets,” I guess you could say—some people call it “academic poetry”—being in conversation with centuries of dead poets and how that comes with some respect and humility. I’ve never actually thought of it that way, but it seems true.
  Lisa Wells: Of course, if you wanted to honor the long dead poets you’d take up performance and recite all your poems.
  Guernica: I personally really enjoy reading, and going to readings, even if it’s sometimes a trial. The social aspect of poetry is one of the special things about it. You get to have these nighttime communions with whoever decides to show up.
  Lisa Wells: So let me ask you, how did you become interested in poetry?
  Guernica: I had always thought of myself as a writing-inclined person.
  Lisa Wells: I like that. I like “writing-inclined”!
  Guernica: In high school, I was having a very rough time, like most people, and I found those good old Beat poets at about sixteen. I also had a friend or love interest at that time who was a writer, and I wrote poems to impress her. It really just came to life overnight, and I was so scared that I would give it up, that it would be like a hobby, because I loved it so much and it was just kind of that thing where you close your eyes and say “don’t give this up, don’t give this up, don’t give this up.” A whole new life was available to me. And I’ve accepted that life every day since then and fought to keep it.
  Lisa Wells: That’s beautiful.
  Guernica: Were you writing after you dropped out of high school?
  Lisa Wells: Like you, I was “writing-inclined.” Those open mic poetry readings were my gateway drug. In the beginning, I would go and case the joint, I wouldn’t read my own work because I was chicken-shit. I wanted to see what everyone else was made of before I popped my head up, which was characteristic of a general defensiveness at the time.
  I was always a sort of wannabe intellectual, even though I was also a classic fuck-up. I read a lot and my friends and I talked about the books we were reading. I had a library card, but I could never get them back on time, then I’d be avoidant of the fees. I remember feeling that there were never enough books. I worked at Powell’s for a while, in the coffee shop. That was when I started mainlining poetry. I’d spend my breaks reading in the stacks. I probably read and wrote poems for eleven or twelve years without any kind of formal guidance. It may sound like a boast, but in the end, it just took me longer to improve. Feedback is precious.
  Guernica: It took me a while to realize that myself. I planned to go through college without taking creative writing courses. I had that kind of beatnik antagonism towards creative writing industries. When I finally took one it helped me a lot in the long run.
  Lisa Wells: I remember this. At that age, if you demonstrate any talent at all, you don’t want to be sullied.
  Guernica: It’s a good thing to be, sullied, or contaminated, by well-meaning, thoughtful people.
  Lisa Wells: Right. Poor us! Meanwhile, these guys that we idolized as iconoclasts had classical educations.
  Guernica: Allen Ginsberg, I always remember, was writing really rigid stuff until his late thirties. He tried really hard to write Columbia University poetry and be a scholar.
  Lisa Wells: How do you write “Columbia University poetry”?
  Guernica: Well, you know, Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling aren’t around anymore, so it’s a little different.
  Lisa Wells: I guess there will always be some beef to be worked out in the name of poetry. Not so many years ago, there was all this anxiety about experimentalism. People wanting to say what is and is not poetry. It was boring. Some adversaries can enliven the conversation and help you grow, but that was just 100 percent stultifying. I write fairly “accessible” poems, but I’ve always felt that pushing an agenda of accessibility smacks of middle class sanctimony. It’s offensive when people are like, “What kind of poem can you write to reach that person digging ditches?” Well, actually, I come from those people, and they have the capacity to be moved by the whole gamut of human endeavor. Fuck off, you know? It’s so condescending.
  I’m totally promiscuous, I’ll read anything, and I’ve enjoyed a great many kinds of poetry. I think if you’re making it your business to tell poets what kind of poetry they should be writing, there’s probably some disavowed stuff you need to work through so you can write better poems.
  Guernica: How does poetry inform your work as an interviewer?
  Lisa Wells: Interviewing comes easy to me. I suspect it’s similar for you. For whatever reason, I’m the sort of person people want to tell their secrets to. One of the reasons, probably, is that I’m actually interested in what they have to say. There’s nothing more pleasurable for me than talking to someone who wants to be seen and appreciates the opportunity to think aloud. I feel more alive in that position. It’s harder for me to answer questions. I don’t know what that is. I might be guarded, to some extent… I think it was also a kind of survival adaptation, to keep the other person talking so that I wouldn’t be looked at too closely.
  The nonfiction book I’ve been working on for the past five years has involved interviewing people who’ve sacrificed their comfort in order to live in accordance with a belief system, and each of their belief systems is different, but it was very healing for me to spend so much time in conversation with those people who have suffered painful traumas and have found ways to reconcile with that history, and now devote their lives to bringing reconciliation into the world. There’s no abstraction, there’s nothing really—and I don’t mean for this to sound anti-intellectual—but there’s nothing really academic about it. It’s like, “I survived and therefore I will help others.”
  The final thing to say is those conversations impart a sense of scale. While it’s true that poetry is a matter of life and death, so is everything else, so no big deal.
  Guernica: I find it as a way to experience things and meet people who would otherwise be overly skeptical of me or who I just can’t face in my shyness. I hear people say, “All I want to do is write poetry. I’m not a writer, I’m a poet.” I think that’s fine, but I just can’t imagine that because my life would be so small if I only read and wrote poems.
  Lisa Wells: So you said you’re shy?
  Guernica: Basically.
  Lisa Wells: This interests me, because I don’t know if I would code as a shy person, but I basically am shy and feel quite a bit of anxiety whenever I’m working on a piece. So how do you get over it? Do you have strategies?
  Guernica: If I’m so interested in something, I can’t stop myself from submitting to it. I’m scared of just living in my bubble and having that be my life because I’ve seen what that looks like so writing is a way for me to escape it. I’ve always loved reading about method acting and the extremes of it, because sometimes when I’m writing a story about someone, I feel like I’m getting drunk on that person in the way that an actor gets drunk on a character.
  Lisa Wells: That’s fascinating. During the period of writing this book, I was in a major life transition, and I was so racked with anxiety—it was totally debilitating, but I still had to do these interviews. The trick that I came up with was that I would pretend that I was their therapist. Not like I would perform a shrink parody, but more like selfless listening. It would pull me out of the equation and anything that I might want from the person, or any kind of anxiety I had about being a fraud. That’s how I survived that year.
  I like the notion of getting drunk on someone. Once people lock into self-narration, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s like you’re watching someone recognize their own value, or the context of who they are and why what they’re doing matters.
  Guernica: I’m not a small-talk person, necessarily, so the units of measure of small-talk versus self-narration and insight and reflection that go into an interview-length conversation, say, I really require that in some measure. Because I am basically conscientious, in the past I have not been the sort of person who trespasses or wanders as far as I would like. Unless I’m going to write about it, then I’ll do it. It gives me a vocational reason to do things that I might stop myself from doing.
  Lisa Wells: So what is this drive to widen the world in reaction to?
  Guernica: See, now you’re interviewing me, but that’s fine. I grew up in a pretty contained suburb, and I was raised mostly by my mom and my grandparents. My grandparents are from a Greek immigrant family. There was a big, immigrant-based sense that the world is a dangerous place, and if you step out of the lines, it will swallow you. I think part of loving the Beats was that these were well-educated young people who decided to do the crazy thing of stepping outside the lines and they were doing it as a poetic, intellectual pursuit of drunkenness.
  Lisa Wells: It’s interesting that we should have some of these things in common and then have such different origin stories. For me, there was very little oversight and few rules. I had no curfew, for example. There was no messaging about the world being unsafe, which was wonderful, but of course, sometimes the world is unsafe, so you end up learning the hard way. And yet, I also feel the pressure of mortality; to keep pushing out the walls.
  Poetry isn’t therapy, but you can stage the same sorts of excavations and inquiries that you do in the context of therapy. The real terror is not what you already know, it’s whatever is magnetizing and constellating your life that you’re not aware of—at least, for me, that’s the fear.
  Guernica: I’m sometimes frustrated by the process of attempting entry back into an ecstatic or beautiful state of poem-making, and not being able to enter it with the frequency that a type of chaotic mind requires.
  Lisa Wells: It’s my sense that a lot of people have this experience, whether as a result of a personal trauma, or the trauma of industrial civilization—intermittent disassociation from the body. When a person has a problem with numbing or checking out, violence, drunkenness, sex, hallucination, whatever—extremes can be very seductive, as a strategy to feel and to locate a boundary. That’s kind of Trauma 101, but the tapering of extremes can be useful for recalibrating your inner compass toward more subtle sensations. That’s another way to read the thwarted creative process, because of course everyone wants to have their finger in the socket of ecstasy at all times, to be a channel, but there’s real value in riding out the flat states and using them to recalibrate, or as a kind of blank screen on which an everyday miracle can be viewed. The fact that you have food to feed yourself, for example, or the fact that you’re still breathing.

• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2018/04/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-131-lisa-wells/

  The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #131: Lisa Wells
  By Emma Winsor Wood
  April 12th, 2018
  When I arrived in Iowa to start at the Writers’ Workshop, wide-eyed and all of twenty-five, Lisa Wells, a poet and nonfiction writer originally from Portland, had already graduated but still lingered; she was one of the lucky few to receive a coveted third-year teaching position. I saw her frequently at the café in the local bookstore, and occasionally at the local dive. She had the air of a female Rochester—dark, mysterious, intense—and she, unlike many of us poets, was a “real adult”—she had dropped out of tenth grade; she had worked for fifteen years before getting a BFA from Goddard and coming to Iowa; she had gotten divorced. I was too scared to talk to her, but I read her poems and essays avidly online, and got to know her that way, through her work.
  Wells, whose debut collection of poetry, The Fix, was selected for the 2017 Iowa Poetry Prize, has a book of nonfiction, Believers, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2019.
  Wells has taught poetry and nonfiction writing at several universities. She lives in Seattle, where she and poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson edit The Volta and run a small press called Letter Machine Editions.
  Wells and I spoke over Skype about the “false self,” mysticism, confessional poetry, and writing across genres.
  ***
  The Rumpus: Your book opens with an epigraph from the French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous: “We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.” Why?
  Lisa Wells: Well, all killing aside, the false woman can be helpful. Particularly when, for whatever reason, the body has become uninhabitable. But for me, when I was writing that book, the gap between the false self I used to negotiate the world and my inner life became too big; it was untenable. The book wound up being a kind of attempt to integrate those selves. It felt pretty violent at times.
  Rumpus: So when you talk about the false self, are you talking about the masks we all wear—the performative self out in the world—or is it not as specific as that?
  Wells: Yeah, I think that’s one way of thinking about it. We all have a “false self” to some extent—that’s how Jung defined the term “persona”—but I was doing battle with something a bit more inhibiting. It’s supposed to function as a vehicle to facilitate movement through the world, and it became more like carrying a dead woman—like I was carrying my own corpse, in a sense. I couldn’t make direct contact with the environment anymore because I’d delegated so heavily to this false self. I don’t know how else to put it.
  It starts out as a method for navigating anxiety or fear or whatever, but ends up causing numbness. It takes the pleasure out of life—because so much of life’s pleasure is between people, in spontaneous exchange.
  But that’s what the poem could offer. When I couldn’t really make direct contact myself, I could at least try to make it through the poem.
  Rumpus: What is “the fix”?
  Wells: You mean, where does the title come from? Mark Levine. The original title was “The Resurrections,” which was not a great title, but one that made sense to me, because even in the first iteration—which was unwieldy and included a lot of bad poems—I knew there was a desire to die so that a rebirth could be possible. Mark picked up on its themes early on. It’s “the fix” in terms of pain relief through sex, drugs, whatever. But also there’s a kind of relentless testing of the environment, a desire to still the internal stuttering, and find more stable ground. It goes back to the false self. The poems were written during a period when the old way wasn’t going to work anymore, but the new life had failed to materialize. Like living in the cleft of the continent as it’s spreading. Are you going in the drink or are you going to make the leap?
  Rumpus: You describe The Fix as a kind of divorce book, one written during “the slow dissolution of [your] first marriage.” I was surprised to see this, because the book felt much wider and rangier to me. Do you still see the book this way?
  Wells: Would I say the book is about my divorce? I mean, no. But that unraveling occasioned a lot of the poems. Marriage is an interesting frame, because it’s unfolding in the moment, but it’s also the arena where the past comes back to haunt you—what one’s notion of a family is, and how one gets their needs met in the dyad, and this negotiation of desire, and what parts of self have to be suppressed in order to maintain peace in the unit.
  Kristin Dombek has this essay, “Letter from Williamsburg,” where she describes the experience of being immobilized by the question “Is it him or is it me?”—and, of course, it’s neither, or it’s both/and. The proposition is too limiting, and you can tear yourself in half; there’s no answer in the binary. Despair of this-or-that-ness inflected a lot of the poems as I was writing them.

  Rumpus: There is a strong thread of religious imagery and language throughout the book (e.g. “Their faces simple / as the hill at Golgotha,” or “You’re the trembling flame that fevered / the flesh of Teresa Avila”) and the speaker is very solitary throughout. This is a book of masturbation—”my own two hands working / deep inside the sheets”—not intercourse (though some of that does, of course, happen), a book of dispossession, and, maybe, possession; of guilt and maybe desire for punishment as well. I’d be curious to know more about your own relationship to religion and/or the spiritual, and how you see either figuring in The Fix.
  Wells: Well, first let me say that it’s very masturbatory. Frankly, I was in a dry spell, so it was a real preoccupation for me at the time. And that’s in the Cixous, writing as a way of inhabiting the body: your body is yours, take it!
  I’m not sure if there’s an explicit connection between masturbation and religion, but, yeah… I’m interested in mystics, in ecstatic and extreme states, even when they veer into the paranoid/delusional. I wouldn’t call myself a religious person, but it also seems like an arbitrary denial. There’s no system to which I adhere, no particular God I pray to, but I do feel like I’m in conversation with some amorphous force, especially when I’m writing. I mean, what could be more common to say? Most writers have some sort of relationship with the muse or whatever—however you conceptualize it.
  Rumpus: Another thread of imagery that moves throughout is that of the beast and the bestial: “I am a beast,” you write. Is this the beast out of the Book of Revelation, the false prophet who opposed Christ?
  Wells: I don’t know if I could have said if you didn’t ask. There’s a sort of flailing, homeless grief that has recurred in my own life. It’s almost a sense of possession that has brought me to my knees. But it’s also familiar to me in the people I grew up around—a reactive, childish, self-injuring beast. The poem that’s titled “BEAST” is about someone I was close to and who died by suicide. I guess likening it to possession is the closest I can come. I certainly don’t think of a literal animal.
  Rumpus: It’s not the monster in the closet?
  Wells: It’s probably in there, too. It might also help to say, though I’d rather not focus too much on what my poems are “about,” that a lot of the people I’ve loved are addicts. When you talk about guilt, I think there’s a certain measure of survivor’s guilt, for sure.
  Rumpus: Elsewhere you wrote: “Didn’t motor oil smear that rainbow in me?” I love this idea of beauty (the rainbow) emerging from filth (motor oil) and it reminds me of what you’ve written about Portland, your hometown: ”It’s the Portland I remember best: industrial gray, rain pooling under bridges, big concrete pylons.” How do you think the Portland aesthetic—maybe even the 90s aesthetic—influenced, or lingered in, your writing? I do feel like that quote—with the rainbow and motor oil—captured something of what’s happening the book, maybe a kind of transmutation of the not pretty or dirty into the “beauty” of the lyric.
  Wells: I think you’re right to connect the two. Portland, and my milieu in particular, could be pretty gritty, and the people who were charged with my care were sort of, uh, prone to socialize with the world’s fallen. I should probably resist stereotyping my parents and neighbors and stuff. But, later, I found Denis Johnson and others who could write the transcendent and ecstatic within these broken people’s attempts to make their lives go, without resorting to caricature. It reinterpreted my history for me in a way that made it more attractive. It forms a kind of feedback loop: I’m attracted to that in other writers’ work, and naturally I want to create the same tensions in mine.
  Rumpus: What books or which poets were you reading a lot while you were working on this?
  Wells: I was reading a lot of Denis Johnson and James Wright, another master of the high and low—and Doug Powell, and even some Wyatt and Donne.
  For context, when I went to the Workshop, I was so untutored. I’d never taken a proper creative writing class. I had really limited experience with the canon. I’d just been reading my way around the bookstore. I was reading a lot of famous middle-aged poets like Sharon Olds, Carolyn Forché, Li-Young Lee, Joy Harjo, Yusef Komunyakaa—“rockstars” of a certain generation. But few dead people.
  So when I was at Iowa I was trying to fill in some of the gaps in my education. I fell in love with Emily Dickinson for the first time at thirty years old, and Elizabeth Bishop.
  Rumpus: In The Fix, you write poems in dialogue with many non-poets: Orozco, Klimt, the Talking Heads. Even when you invoke Blake, it is his for work as a visual artist, not as a writer.
  Wells: It was probably a device to some extent, or an excuse to think about why those artists moved me. There’s so much of me in the book and “I, I, I”—I just wanted opportunities to explore my obsessions while removing myself as the sole focus. Also, when in doubt of one’s own capacities, it can be heartening to engage someone else’s genius.
  Rumpus: Has your work ever been called confessional?
  Wells: I don’t know that I’ve heard confessional specifically. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone said that.
  In the old days, I wrote these really bad Larry Levis rip-offs with forced epiphanies and in this register that was kind of jokey, and so disconnected from my own experience. People had a lot to say about those poems that I hope doesn’t apply anymore.
  Rumpus: I’m curious to hear about what led you to Iowa and the workshop. You had a very unorthodox educational path.
  Wells: The short answer is, I’d been working for so long at that point, scrubbing toilets and making coffee—I was sick of it, but I lacked imagination for what else I might be able to do. I made a writer friend who’d gone to MFA school, and was teaching at Portland State. He read some of my poems and was like, “You know, these are promising. You should go to grad school and then get a job teaching.” Because this was the era when that was a conceivable path.
  Once I got on the school track, I was pretty devoted. I did undergrad in two-and-a-half years and immediately moved to Iowa City, and I was thrilled—like, wow, I came out of nowhere and these guys are going to pay me to write. It was unthinkable.
  Rumpus: As a poet, who, like you, also writes essays, I’m interested to hear what you have to say about the relationship between the genres. How would you say writing the one influences the other?
  Wells: I used to do both at the same time. I’d write poems in the morning and then visit a prose draft in the afternoon. It was nice toggling back and forth—I felt like my mind was able to access different vocabularies. But I haven’t written a new poem in two years, basically since I locked into this nonfiction book. It’s proven difficult because, to be honest, I didn’t really know how to write a book when I started.
  One thing I will say about prose and poetry: I don’t write lyric essays, but I do think poetry is good preparation for being okay with not really knowing how it’s all going to come together. That’s been helpful. Essayists will say, “The essay is the activity of the mind alive on the page.” They use the same rhetoric.
  Rumpus: So is it essays, or is it a single narrative?
  Wells: I don’t know yet. I just turned in a draft and that’s a question I asked my editor, if she thinks they’re discrete essays or if they should be stitched into a single narrative. It ended up being more thematically coherent then I proposed originally. And some of the characters wound up returning as I moved through this subcultural network of “rewilding”—people who are anti-civilizationists, people living intentionally in the abandonments of empire in various ways. It’s a small world, as it turns out.
  Now I want to write about rock n’ roll, or really anything other than the end of the world.
  Rumpus: Do you miss writing poems?
  Wells: Yeah. After Iowa, I had a teaching gig in Singapore. I became very sick, and I didn’t yet know with what. I wrote a second book of poems in that period, in a flash. But the second book is also really brutal, because it’s about my deterioration. I hope I’m done with that sort of excavation for a while.
  I always feel like I’m starting over. I don’t know how I ever wrote a poem. I really do have that feeling.

• Hugo House - https://hugohouse.org/store/class/forms-in-poetry-lisa-wells/

  Forms in Poetry

  Intermediate | Form describes the way a poem deploys its line, rhythm, sound, and arrangement on the page, but might also refer to a conceptual restraint or organizing idea. Students will explore a range of poetic possibilities from traditional forms to nonce and experimental forms through class discussion and writing prompts. Students will also select poems to memorize and recite, and participate in discussion of one another’s work. Readings could include Sir Thomas Wyatt, Inger Christensen, Li Po, and Fred Moten.
  Instructor: Lisa Wells
  Class Type: 6 Sessions
  Poetry
  Term: Summer 2018
  Start Date: 07/25/2018
  End Date: 08/29/2018
  Days of the Week: Wednesday
  Time: 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
  Minimum Class Size: 5
  Maximum Class Size: 15
  $265.50
  Member Price:
  Become a member >
  $295.00

• The Volta - http://www.thevolta.org/thevolta-masthead.html

  Lisa Wells (Editor) is the author of The Fix, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize selected by Brenda Shaughnessy (University of Iowa Press 2018) and Believers, a collection of essays forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Best New Poets, The Believer, and many others.

The Fix

Publishers Weekly. 265.12 (Mar. 19, 2018): p50.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Fix
Lisa Wells. Univ. of Iowa, $19.95 trade paper
(70p) ISBN 978-1-60938-547-7
Wells, a 2017 Iowa Poetry Prize winner, tests the limits of any fix that religion, drugs, sex, or art might offer in order to "endure this/ apparatus." Skillfully drawing on high art and pop culture, Wells tracks the development of self that comes with "Every day/ learning how little I know." She displays a remarkable sense of syntax and rhythm, as when her speaker relates her own conception: "his hands that gripped/ the hips that dropped// the egg that met/ the fish that struck// the match in me// I'm burning." Throughout, sex offers a set of complex satisfactions while also being the site of abuse, power, and trauma. The speaker's intense homoerotic exchanges allow for pleasure and agency: "I hoisted her bare ass/ to the titanium shelf/ and nudged apart her knees." Under duress, the speaker prays to a god--"god of the refried cigarette/ the No-Doz overdose"--who "could not spare me the fingers/ of fatherless boys." But the speaker turns to such secular schema as object relations to orient the "me// of little faith; little/ lamb; locust/ on which the gentle Baptist dined." Line by line, Wells delivers a brilliant, taut, terrifying debut that renders the parts of the inner and outer world for which there is no real cure. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Fix." Publishers Weekly, 19 Mar. 2018, p. 50. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531977320/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fa7d5426. Accessed 29 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A531977320