SAINTED, 2021
How is it that Lisa Zimmerman brings these ancient saints, the subjects of her radiant poems, as close to us as our own breath? Their presences, illuminated by the steady flame of Zimmerman’s mind and heart, shimmer across time and distance, coming to rest within her words and silences as if this is where they have always lived. Weaving together past and present, shorn hair and winter light, Zimmerman invites us, again and again, into “the great unmanageable mystery.” In the company of this book, we are less alone. ~Kasey Jueds
As you might expect, the saints in Lisa Zimmerman’s remarkable new collection, Sainted, are assailed at every turn: “drawn and quartered…/ drowned in the swallowing sea or martyred/by burning, beheading, by boiling oil, or the simple sword.” But just telling these “sweet terrible” stories isn’t really Zimmerman’s project. Instead, this is a questioning, lyric book about filling the void of which a paradoxical God is both cause and cure. “God roots around inside of me/ like hunger,” says Saint Clare. And it is Clare and her mentor Saint Francis—saints of compassion and denial—that the poet uses to bracket both the lives of other saints and her own. The voices in these monologues and meditations are pitch-perfect. We are in the hands of a poet who juggles both the mystical and the everyday with consummate skill. ~Keith Ratzlaff
The Hours I Keep
Testaments to the way Lisa Zimmerman exposes hidden or fleeting truths
these poems ignite our empathy and focus us on usually overlooked things that deserve attention: the underside of a flicker’s wings, mud sliding under horse hooves, a ladybug in the hair, the steady breathing of a husband. The subject of this quietly stunning collection is ultimately “the heart under the heart.” Open to any poem and you will want to read another and another. —Andrea Hollander, author of Landscape with Female Figure
Lisa Zimmerman’s poems in The Hours I Keep are grounded not primarily in the details of place, but the heart of what it is to love, to worry, to fall and rise again. Lisa Zimmerman’s poems in this, her third full-length book, are more about resilience than joy—they repay the reader’s work not with blues and melancholy, but with hope and the idea that though the world brings us troubles, we can muster the strength and faith to face what’s coming next. These are poems by a poet who knows well what poetry can do. —Rick Campbell
Zimmerman’s language pops and snaps, surprising at every turn, and sings with a full breath from line to line. Her imagery beautifully renders both nature’s heartbreaking loveliness, it’s redemptive power, and its dangerous, often savage unpredictability. “See how stars are pulled down/ into sunlit river stones…” the narrator of “Gravity” writes, even as she acknowledges that force’s destructive power, how “a rampage,/ disguised as a river, drags earth and rock down.” These are deft, lyrical poems that express the rawest truths with grace and dignity. Zimmerman’s is a universe where horses and dogs are not only faithful companions but vessels of the divine. From escaping the ghost of an alcoholic mother, to finding a rare and passionate love, to the anguish of putting down her favorite mare and her beloved dog, to the self-doubt the narrator experiences, The Hours I Keep resonates with raw honesty, joy, grief, and existential yearning. These are necessary, urgent poems—difficult, wrenching, celebratory and ecstatic by turns. —Ilyse Kusnetz
Photo by John Zimmerman
The Light at the Edge of Everything
Time and again Lisa Zimmerman gives us exquisite lyrics, of a girl child growing, of a mother watching, of the violation that brushes against us, of the love that disturbs even as we survive this enterprise of living. This is a brave and lovely book of poems. —Meena Alexander
Lisa Zimmerman’s poems are deeply humane meditations on joy, loss, love, suffering, but never defeat. The Light at the Edge of Everything is precisely that — a reservoir of endurance and courage from which we can draw to make a world of luminous presence, through the daily practice of attention, amidst the complexity of living our lives. This is one of those rare big books, in that it offers the reader a chance to “love the story inside the body, / the strange and dangerous narrative.” It gives you the courage to “walk out in your bare feet / across the reassuring grass / that will rise up again behind your footprints.” — George Kalamaras
Against a rural American background of horses, hay bales, scratchy junipers, and the refrain of coyotes, Lisa Zimmerman does her best to figure out the mysterious ties that bind us together — parent, child, lover, spouse. And she fails, beautifully. — Billy Collins
How the Garden Looks from Here
Email Lisazmfa@gmail.com for purchase
In How the Garden Looks from Here, Lisa Zimmerman’s poems resonate, often like Van Gogh paintings. They open for the presence of magpies in a cornfield, for the son who is “not afraid when he wakes,” for the hour filled “with wet boots and socks and black paws.” They tap into archetypal sense, and their powered imagery expresses primal synergy with irreplaceable constituents of the natural world. Sometimes her poems listen to the “living invisible world / below the boat,” sometimes they witness the uniqueness of daily events, and always they are grounded in reverence. They grieve for what we have done to the planet, for what is passing away from our lives, as simultaneously they take heart in the “breathing hour,” where “all things thrive.” -James Grabill
Snack Size: Poems
Mello Press, Limited Edition 2012
Traveling Among the Animals
Pudding House, 2002 (Out of Print)
In Places Without Time Nothing Hurries
Leaping Mountain Press, 1987 (Out of Print)