Joie de Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 (City Lights Spotlight)

Inspired by the Beats, Black Mountain, and the New York School, Lisa Jarnot emerged in the 1990s as one of the foremost poets of the post-Language avant-garde. Joie de Vivre draws on twenty years of work, from the bold fragmentation of her mixed media debut, Some Other Kind of Mission, to the experimental lyricism of her recent Night Scenes. Following the poet's evolution through her engagements with form and music, Joie de Vivre showcases Jarnot's restless virtuosity and relentless curiosity. The archaic, the surreal, the pastoral, the political—no register of language proves too recalcitrant for her expansive sense of song.

Praise for Joie de Vivre:

"Riveting . . . Reading this work is truly a joy."—Publishers Weekly

"This compilation includes the best of Jarnot’s Whitmanesque reflections and Ginsbergian outcries, speech acts that list always toward an avant-garde."—Booklist

"Her ideas meddle in the traditions of form, medium, sound, and arrangement to recall the modernism of Joyce and Stein . . . This selection highlights her inventiveness."—Library Journal

About the Author:

Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1967, Lisa Jarnot studied with Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo and later earned an MFA at Brown University. The author of four full-length poetry collections and the former editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter, she has also just published Robert Duncan: The Ambassador From Venus (University of California Press, 2012), the definitive biography of the San Francisco poet. Since the mid-1990s, she has lived in New York City.