Lewis Warsh: Inseparable, Poems 1995-2005

Inseparable collects poems written between 1995 and 2005 by the New York poet, editor and novelist Lewis Warsh. Strongly identified with New York since the 1960s, when he co-founded Angel Hair magazine with Anne Waldman, Warsh makes poems from the city’s linguistic fabric, interwoven with a bemused real-time interiority. The 35 poems of this collection are pitted with reminiscences made approachable to the reader by their lack of self-absorption; it is the momentum of the will to persist by means of language– moving, word by word –against the incipient flickerings of mortality, that is their real logic. This act of self-propulsion may be subject to doubt ( Can we spend our lives feeding/off simple endurance? ), but it is humbly pursued: Warsh resists the inflated rhetoric such preoccupations usually attract and sticks instead with (in the words of his colleague Clark Coolidge) confusion, in strict order.