Reassurance in Negative Space

by Elizabyth A. Hiscox

Overview

Elizabyth A. Hiscox's Reassurance in Negative Space is a debut collection with the seasoned deftness of a master in its keen intelligence, wit, innovative diction, unflinching handling of loss and grief, and deep lyricism. Hiscox muses with revelatory insights on such wide-ranging topics as multifarious netsuke, nuclear fallout, artichokes “coming into new brilliance,” the DMV line, the Zen of “the sublime [that] can spring from small things.” By turns ecstatic and somber, profane and sacred, wise and whimsical, Hiscox proves she is a poet of the first order with this memorable collection.

PRAISE FOR REASSURANCE IN NEGATIVE SPACE:

In Elizabyth Hiscox’s impressive debut collection, Reassurance in Negative Space, there are poems about art and loss and ecology, reindeer moss and netsuke, the precariousness of 1950s high-heeled bedroom slippers. Her poems are tightly, urgently made. Hers is a poetry held together by ingenious double meanings and wordplay, twinnings and twinings, paradox, subtle jokes and puns, fierce and delicate ironies, a rigorous intelligence and a vigor of spirit so charged and fluent that whatever she puts before us takes on resonance and import.
- Nancy Eimers, author of Oz

Elizabyth Hiscox’s new collection, Reassurance in Negative Space, is haunting in the way that brilliance of mind and vision encounter an almost secret vocabulary. This is the revealing intercession of one road upon another in the outskirts of Rome a hundred years past. It is also the infrared optics of ideas of negative space peering into previously unobserved, undisturbed dark matter. A few of the poems surprise utterly, have almost a pre-creation memory for us of things that startle and seem true. She is a terrific and sometimes very funny poet of the first order.
- Norman Dubie, author of The Quotations of Bone

There is throughout this volume a deep and humane lyric wisdom, an almost fatalistically brilliant humor. . . . Here is a debut collection bold enough to cast an eye on Truth in poems that are both narrative (storied) and innovative, necessary poetry.
- Cynthia Hogue (from the foreword), author of In June the Labyrinth

“All angels pant as surely as they part”-Elizabyth Hiscox’s Reassurance in Negative Space studies the relationship between negative capability and communion. Between art and comfort. No rote reassurance is sought after or offered in these pages-the chocolate bunnies (better than Lent) are delicious but hollow. And after cataloguing and deeply considering the negative spaces of art-from the tiny details of a series of Japanese netsuke sculptures, to Archeology Today articles, to pieces of literature, music, architecture, painting-Hiscox breaks a tender heart with this equivocal and necessary advice for her reader: “Fall already, beautiful.” In this gorgeous and spiritually rugged ekphrastic book I do pant, I do part, and I do fall.
- Sarah Vap, author of Viability

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Elizabyth A. Hiscox is the author of Inventory from a One-Hour Room. She served as Poet-in-Residence at Durham University (UK) and is recipient of Arizona Commission on the Arts and Vermont Studio Center Grants. Selected for the Seventh Avenue Streetscape public-art initiative, her poetry was displayed on a central-Phoenix billboard for a year in conjunction with the city’s First Friday art walks. Hiscox holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a PhD from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. She has taught writing in England, the Czech Republic, and Spain and currently instructs at Western State Colorado University where she is founding director of the Contemporary Writer Series.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781927409985
Publisher:	Able Muse Press
Publication date:	10/02/2017
Pages:	106
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

Elizabyth A. Hiscox is the author of Inventory from a One-Hour Room. She served as Poet-in-Residence at Durham University (UK) and is recipient of Arizona Commission on the Arts and Vermont Studio Center Grants. Also selected for the Seventh Avenue Streetscape public-art initiative, her poetry was displayed on a central-Phoenix billboard for a year in conjunction with the city's First Friday art walks. Hiscox holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a PhD from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. She has taught writing in England, the Czech Republic, and Spain and currently instructs at Western State Colorado University where she is founding director of the Contemporary Writer Series.

Table of Contents

vi Acknowledgments

ix Foreword

__

3 Tallow Candles and Light

5 Netsuke I: Crab

6 Reading Ostriker and Archeology Today for Spiritual Guidance

7 The Trapeze is Always Flying

8 Shrovetide and the Sugar Rush

9 The misnomer of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

10 Inventory from a One-Hour Room

11 a call for catachresis

12 Or What You Will

14 Falling Off of One’s Bedroom Slippers

15 Cellar Physic

16 Late Spring Travelogue, Outer Hebrides

__

18 On Looking Again into Wright’s Forklift, Ohio

19 Cladonia rangifera, Chernobyl

21 Netsuke IV: Ashinaga & Tenaga

22 Sonnet to Room 411b

23 The Pedestal

25 Cakes and Ale

26 The Religiosity of Soup

28 The Red-Eye’s Departure

30 On Rereading a Line from Leaving Resurrection

32 Preparing Trout Caviar in the First Trimester

34 Your body’d gone

36 The River’s Mouth

39 Mead Memo Notebook Spiral, Yellow (II)

40 The Yield

__

42 Four for a Grandmother and Her Past

44 Netsuke V: Octopus

45 One Argument for Maple and Pine-Lined over Marble

46 The Fourth Dynasty in Limestone

47 First Season’s Monsoon

48 Cheval de Frise and Gone-Sweetness at the All-Inclusive

49 Cloud Vineyards

50 Phoenix

51 Early Artichokes

52 Tasting Notes for Two Liquid (de)Vices

53 Netsuke III: Snake

54 Shiny Magazine on the Finer Things

56 Fourteen Minutes Too Late for the Cheese Counter

57 Roles and Reckoning near Solstice

__

60 “Grand Rapids Arch”

62 The Complex of the Yolk Base

64 Netsuke II: [ ]

65 To Older Cold

66 The Myrtle-Wood Bowl

68 Why Would Anyone Want to Live (Couplets for a Hero)

69 Barcelona

71 Vanguard Aria for Minor Organs

72 Reassurance in Negative Space

74 A Poem with Three Lines from One Night in Portland

75 Night Being the Consort of Chaos in Milton

Editorial Reviews

In Elizabyth Hiscox’s impressive debut collection, Reassurance in Negative Space, there are poems about art and loss and ecology, reindeer moss and netsuke, the precariousness of 1950s high-heeled bedroom slippers. Her poems are tightly, urgently made. Hers is a poetry held together by ingenious double meanings and wordplay, twinnings and twinings, paradox, subtle jokes and puns, fierce and delicate ironies, a rigorous intelligence and a vigor of spirit so charged and fluent that whatever she puts before us takes on resonance and import.

— Nancy Eimers, author of Oz

Elizabyth Hiscox’s new collection, Reassurance in Negative Space, is haunting in the way that brilliance of mind and vision encounter an almost secret vocabulary. This is the revealing intercession of one road upon another in the outskirts of Rome a hundred years past. It is also the infrared optics of ideas of negative space peering into previously unobserved, undisturbed dark matter. A few of the poems surprise utterly, have almost a pre-creation memory for us of things that startle and seem true. She is a terrific and sometimes very funny poet of the first order.

— Norman Dubie, author of The Quotations of Bone

There is throughout this volume a deep and humane lyric wisdom, an almost fatalistically brilliant humor. . . . Here is a debut collection bold enough to cast an eye on Truth in poems that are both narrative (storied) and innovative, necessary poetry.

— Cynthia Hogue (from the foreword), author of In June the Labyrinth

“All angels pant as surely as they part”—Elizabyth Hiscox’s Reassurance in Negative Space studies the relationship between negative capability and communion. Between art and comfort. No rote reassurance is sought after or offered in these pages—the chocolate bunnies (better than Lent) are delicious but hollow. And after cataloguing and deeply considering the negative spaces of art—from the tiny details of a series of Japanese netsuke sculptures, to Archeology Today articles, to pieces of literature, music, architecture, painting—Hiscox breaks a tender heart with this equivocal and necessary advice for her reader: “Fall already, beautiful.” In this gorgeous and spiritually rugged ekphrastic book I do pant, I do part, and I do fall.

— Sarah Vap, author of Viability

From the Publisher