every lines other: The Collected Poems of Lyx Ish aka Elizabeth Was

In all registers of life Elizabeth Was/Lyx Ish strove for liberation, primarily of the imagination in its myriad manifestations, but also freedom from enslavement to exploitive economic systems, sexist body politics and domestic arrangements—ultimately, freedom from a separate self, and freedom to play with the unknown. But over and beyond that, she embodied that goal, which is more properly a process, for the many others she included in her vast raying-out of warmth and influence. The other great and related theme is relationality itself, which is the freedom from separateness: the “bean being bean” that is also being earth, water, air and heat(fire). Her writings, collected here by loving survivors mIEKAL aND and Liaizon Wakest, sparkle with the interplay of her many primal roles: artist, mother, lover, daughter, friend—a “woman” and multi-artist in constant multilogue with those categories—in language that romps and tumbles over itself in gleeful fulfillment of utopian (or, as she writes, “oputian,” acknowledging the never-perfect, ever-mutable nature of attempted utopias) intimations.