The Inside Room

The Inside Room, by Lisa Andrews, traces and inspects the way back to hidden places buried within ourselves. The poet invites us to get inside her own / chariot to hell and travel down to the rawest relationship we know. The story of mother and daughter is raveled in rage, love and desire. Her poetic vision is large yet precise. The poems sweep from myth to memory to present moment, illuminating the numinous threads which bind art and survival together. Andrews’ diamond stylus etches vivid worlds into the glass walls of our imagination. This is a book you will come back to for its siren call to live your own life with more hunger, more love, more tenderness.

–Carla Drysdale

We, readers, exist on a spectrum of motherlessness, and Lisa Andrews’ heartbreaking rendering of our cleaved state is exquisite, pitiless, gorgeous. Andrews’ scrupulous eye for the exact marries the unflinching stare of the poet at her situation ( You almost had me / believing I was your audience, the one / you flowered for ). Other work here, generous, loving, and anguished, tries to recapture the father, too (the remarkable Turkish Coffee notes How it blazed, / almost boiled up like oil … / I never told anyone how much I liked / that bitter taste ). Read The Inside Room and you will remember what you lost; these poems will return to you your memories.

–Sharon Kraus

Disappoint a mother and you get winter. Lisa Andrews’ coolly passionate collection, The Inside Room, submerges readers into myths you might be familiar with–such as the story of Persephone–but have never heard rendered with such intimate clarity. Longing rises quietly in these poems, and without fanfare. I love the ability of these crisp, nostalgic poems to admit their hunger, and to welcome us into the feast they deliver.

–Lynn McGee