Lisa Russ Spaar is a contemporary American poet, professor, and essayist. She is currently a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia and the director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Vanitas, Rough: Poems, and Satin Cash: Poems. Her latest collection, Orexia, will be published by Persea Books in 2017. Her poem “Temple Gaudete,” published in IMAGE Journal, won a 2016 Pushcart Prize.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Second Acts: Two Translations of Giovanni Pascoli
Lisa Russ Spaar reads two new translations of the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli, "Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli" and "Last Dream."...
“In the Primal Woods”: On Jill Bialosky’s “Asylum”
Lisa Russ Spaar visits “Asylum,” the new collection by Jill Bialosky....
Thinking about “the Self” (ish) in the Time of Pandemic
In her important book about love, language, and the individual, Eros the Bittersweet, philosopher, classicist, and poet Anne Carson speaks ...
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Pandemic Edition
Lisa Russ Spaar takes a look at second books by Kathryn Cowles, Peter Kline, and Michael Prior....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Francesc Parcerisas and Ye Lijun
Lisa Russ Spaar takes a look at translated books by poets Francesc Parcerisas and Ye Lijun....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: L. E. Sissman and Lynn Martin
Lisa Russ Spaar takes a second look at second books by poets L. E. Sissman and Lynn Martin....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Barbara Guest and Gracie Leavitt
Lisa Russ Spaar appreciates second collections of poems by Barbara Guest and Gracie Leavitt....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Shara Lessley and Stephen Cushman
Lisa Russ Spaar takes a second look at second books by poets Shara Lessley and Stephen Cushman....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Joan Murray and Christopher Gilbert
Lisa Russ Spaar takes a second look at second, posthumous books by poets Joan Murray and Christopher Gilbert....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by Charles Simic and Jacob Shores-Argüello
Lisa Russ Spaar takes a second look at second books by poets Charles Simic and Jacob Shores-Argüello....
Migraine Madrigal
This poem appears in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 16, Art To receive the LARB Quarterly ...
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Gabriel Fried and Tomás Q. Morín
Lisa Russ Spaar takes a second look at second books by poets Gabriel Fried and Tomás Q. Morín....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Susan Stewart and Jennifer Chang
Lisa Russ Spaar appreciates the lyric intelligence of Susan Stewart’s and Jennifer Chang’s second collections....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Amy Clampitt and Richard Deming
Lisa Russ Spaar appreciates the second books of Amy Clampitt and Richard Deming....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Olga Broumas and Emilia Phillips
Lisa Russ Spaar is moved by of Olga Broumas’s and Emilia Phillips’s second collections....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Rosanna Warren and Melissa Range
Lisa Russ Spaar takes a second look at second books by poets Rosanna Warren and Melissa Range....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Robert Pinsky and Tess Taylor
Lisa Russ Spaar appreciates the excellence of Robert Pinsky’s and Tess Taylor’s second collections....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: R. T. Smith and Mark Wagenaar
Lisa Russ Spaar appreciates the excellence of R. T. Smith’s and Mark Wagenaar’s second collections....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by Linda Gregerson and Rachel Richardson
Lisa Russ Spaar on "The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep" and "Hundred-Year Wave"....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Forrest Gander and Richard Siken
Lisa Russ Spaar juxtaposes the erotic poetry collections of Forrest Gander and Richard Siken in her “Second Acts” series....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by James Tate and Sam Taylor
Lisa Russ Spaar looks to poets Sam Taylor and James Tate to explay why the two fundamental modes of lyric poetry are crying and laughing....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by Carl Phillips
How Carl Phillips became one of America's most eminent writers....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by Eleanor Stanford and Arthur Sze
Stanford and Sze are "acutely attuned to the physical world, manifested through science, nature, culture, and the sensuous realms of food, drink, and love."...
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry
Traversing the tense, torqued territory between orient and occident, indigenous and empirical, history and amnesia...language makes and unmakes....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by Rae Armantrout and Ye Chun
Rae Armantrout and Ye Chun are poets who go in “quest of” without, to paraphrase Keats, an irritable reaching after any one answer....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Fulton and Bachmann
Lisa Russ Spaar looks at second books of poetry by Beth Bachmann and Alice Fulton....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by Galway Kinnell and David Roderick
On Galway Kinnell's "Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock" and David Roderick's "The Americans"...
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by Peter Streckfus and Jean Valentine
Everybody talks about first books. Second books are more interesting....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Hass and Sze-Lorrain
Two high lyricists, 35 years apart....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Louise Glück and Anne Shaw
Lisa Russ Spaar explores the second books of two well-loved but often misunderstood poets....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry
Amaud Jamaul Johnson following in his predecessors footsteps in reclaiming African-American vernacular and remaking it into an expressive literary language....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry
Lisa Russ Spaar continues her examination of poets’ second acts. In this edition, Louise Bogan and Jessica Fisher....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by Larry Levis and Anna Journey
THE DEATH OF SEAMUS HEANEY this past August reminds us that the passing of any great poet, however old, always feels ...
Second Acts: A Look at Second Books by Ai Ogawa and Kiki Petrosino
What is revealed as the poet makes a kind of jeté, a leap, an imprinting — the landing of a second foot?...
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books by Donald Justice and Allison Benis White
A Second Look at Second Books of poetry by Donald Justice and Allison Benis White....
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books by Geri Doran and Michael S. Harper
THE FALL OF 1982 found me in Harrisonburg, Virginia, recently sprung from graduate school and teaching creative writing at James Madison ...
Second Acts: A Second Look At Second Books of Poetry by Paula Bohince and David Wojahn
Triptych image: Juliana Romano, "Girl Smoking, Klimt," 2011 A GAME I LIKE TO PLAY at certain convenience stores is “juxtapositions.&...
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books by Beckian Fritz Goldberg and Andrew Feld
ONE PLEASURE OF DISCOVERING and revisiting second books of poems for this Second Acts series has been the opportunity to juxtapose ...
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books by Charles Wright and Mary Szybist
I HAVE HEARD Charles Wright say that it is a poet’s third book that signals the arrival of his ...
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by Carol Muske-Dukes and Carol Ann Davis
IN OUR ONGOING SERIES Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry, poet and essayist Lisa ...
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by Tom Andrews and Jessica Greenbaum
Second books of poetry by Tom Andrews and Jessica Greenbaum...
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Webster and Hull
The anatomy of a second book of poems...
