Lisa Fishman is the author of eight books of poetry, a short story collection, and several chapbooks. Her newest poetry book is One Big Time, out on Wave Books in spring, 2025. World Naked Bike Ride was published in Canada by Gaspereau Press in 2022 and was a finalist for the Canadian ReLit Award in short fiction. Other Wave poetry titles are Mad World, Mad Kings, MadComposition(2020) and 24 Pages and other poems(2015). Fishman is also the author of three books on Ahsahta Press:F L O W E R C A R T(2011);The Happiness Experiment(2007);and Dear, Read (2002); the latter was selected by Brenda Hillman as a finalist for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Fishman's other books are Current (Parlor Press, 2011) and The Deep Heart's Core is a Suitcase(New Issues Press, 1996). Fishman's work is anthologized inBest American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn, 2014, ed. Cole Swenson),The Ecopoetry Anthology(Trinity University Press, 2013),The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral(Ahsahta Press, 2012),Not For Mothers Only(Fence Books, 2007),American Poetry: The Next Generation(Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2000) and elsewhere. She is a dual US/Canadian with earlier roots in both the Detroit area and Montreal.
Previous Praise MAD WORLD, MAD KINGS, MAD COMPOSITION Lisa Fishman’s Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition enacts an engaging statement of personal poetics offering up a kind of secular reliquary. Patrick James Dunagan, Colorado Review Poetry as interaction, as a way of being in the world, Fishman suggests, is also a way to sustain a life. The writing process, while ephemeral, nevertheless creates its own kind of cyclical order. Writing isn’t a way to extract truths. Rather, poetry as process creates a life through its ongoing interactions with the world. Emily Barton Altman, Annulet 24 PAGES AND OTHER POEMS This is a world in the midst of creation, an Ars Poetica of everything... Publishers Weekly Like Clare, Fishman can ramble; her friendly, loose-woven writing, with its lack of transitions, can feel like erasure. She also yearns “to hear past words of the self,” to bring other people’s voices into her poems—the people who wrote the books she read, and the human beings who share her rural Wisconsin life. Stephen Burt, Boston Review