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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN num: 9781574231984
ISBN number: 1574231987
Label: Black Sparrow Press
Manufacturer: Black Sparrow Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 221
Printing Date: October 01, 2006
Publishing house: Black Sparrow Press
Sale Popularity Level: 1796106
Studio: Black Sparrow Press
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It is Lyn Lifshin's gift to seem perfectly artless, to make poems of immediacy and power from the humblest of near-to-hand materials. In this, her third collection to be published by Black Sparrow, her themes are those of classic lyric poetry -- the innocence of childhood, the ecstasy of lovemaking, the mystery of death -- and her word choices are the poetic equivalents of the artist's circles, squares, and primary colors. Just as Alexander Calder could make a lion out of a coat hanger, Lyn Lifshin can make something memorable out of even the most familiar nouns -- mother, daughter, wind, moon, lover, horses, roses. Something memorable, 'something sexy ... and entirely her own' (San Francisco Review of Books).
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Rated by buyers 
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BOOK REVIEW
By Therese Broderick
Reprinted by permission of The River Reporter
ANOTHER WOMAN WHO LOOKS LIKE ME
by Lyn Lifshin
If you haven't yet heard of Lyn Lifshin, then consider getting a copy of Another Woman Who Looks Like Me, if for no other reason than to become familiar with one of America's longest-reigning poetry idols. If you're already a fan, then don't miss this collection of 161 new poems, each a glimpse of loss or loneliness that reminds us how it is never easy to know / what not to keep.
Living near Schenectady, Lifshin needs no introduction among upstate New York poets. As recently as July 2006, she was the featured poet at the monthly poetry open mic at the legendary Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs. Lifshin has been writing poetry for more than forty years. She is the author of more than one hundred books--sometimes releasing as many as three in one year--and has edited four anthologies of women writers. She is lauded as Queen of the Small Presses, although her work has appeared as well in major periodicals such as American Poetry Review and The Christian Science Monitor. She has taught also at several colleges, universities, and high schools. Her awards and prizes are numerous. Despite this impressive career, Lyn Lifshin is still not among the approximately five hundred poets profiled on the website of the Academy of American Poets.
Readers who have already had their full of Lifshin's work may consider the title of this book to be a warning that most of the poems therein look too much like her earlier poems. Indeed, the title itself resembles the title of Lifshin's 2004 book, Another Woman's Story. And while it is true that most of these new poems are trademark Lifshin, her writing is neither tiresome nor shallow (except perhaps for Lifshin's persistent substitution of tho for though and of thru for through). If we are still listening to The Rolling Stones, then we can still read Lyn Lifshin.
The book's title is also a signpost for the poems' many beautiful features. The most obvious beauty is the mirroring by one poem of another poem's contents. One poem looks like another in that both contain the same word or phrase. A bedroom vanity, a woman's long hair, the glider chair on the porch--these and many other motifs recur throughout the book, resulting in a thick and satisfying texture. In addition, sometimes two or more poems become entwined in a tighter way as variations on a theme; for example, contiguous poems about the bee man or an entire section entitled a love of blueness.
But the book's deepest mirroring is the encounter of life with death. The me in this collection regards her younger self, her many possible alter egos, and her deceased relatives as highly-charged presences that co-exist in time. Lifshin's poems require that we look in our own mirror and ask ourselves some hard questions. What is our true identity? Who are we in relation to others, or in relation to the past and future?
Lifshin makes those inquiries by focusing on the strong and often painful bonds between female members of an extended family--self, mother, sister, immigrant grandmother, cousin, and the daughter-I-might-have-had. Childhood rites of passage, puberty, the physical features of women, tensions between siblings, childbirth, the ailments of old age, the ghosts of the Holocaust--these are Lifshin's ongoing concerns. This book's largest section of thirty-five poems, written on the body of the night, sketches several erotic encounters.
Given their preoccupations, are these poems intended primarily for female readers? Perhaps. Certainly these poems arise from one woman's physical and emotional experiences. And the most important men in these poems-- a stingy father and a missing lover--disappoint the women in their lives. Nevertheless, these poems are not retro-feminist rants against oppression. The politics of these poems is the one-on-one power game between individual men and women. Therefore, these poems have something to say to male readers, too.
Whether or not entirely autobiographical, these poems do seem to be drawn directly from real life because their surfaces are strewn with the commonplace belongings of flawed human beings: a nicotine-stained clock, a candy dish missing its top, shoplifted cashmere, pink-framed glasses that don't fit. And because the people who owned those belongings are absent or deceased, the poems are, at the least, sad and poignant. At most, the poems are lovely and elegiac. Indeed, the book's last section, a sequence of six poems on the theme of dying birds, is heartbreaking.
The forms of the poems in Another Woman Who Looks Like Me are also consistent with those of Lifshin's previous work. With the exception of one modified pantoum and one modified blues song, these free verse poems don't bother with perfect rhymes or patterned ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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Lyn Lifshin, Another Woman Who Looks Like Me (Black Sparrow, 2007)
Black Sparrow calls Another Woman Who looks Like Me Lifshin's very first "major" collection in seven years; I'd have to disagree with that. The Licorice Daughter is a major collection. Or should be a major collection. I'm not entirely sure what goes into such a description; I only know that last year's The Licorice Daughter should be it.
This is not to say, of course, that Another Woman Who Looks Like Me is not a fine book, as well. Lifshin seems to have really come into her own in the last fifteen or so years, and the books she's released in that time have been the strongest of her career; those who've been following can expect more of the same style here. She lets slip the leads on some of her obsessions, and those who like to dig around and find symbolism in things will find a rich mine to plunder here; Lifshin leaves her repeated images right up near the surface, almost like a challenge to academics. "You have an opinion on my mother's legs?"
Thanks to my financial situation, I buy very, very few books these days, getting most of my reading material out of the library instead. It probably says more than any thousand words I can write that I bought Another Woman Who Looks Like Me, at full price even, and I don't regret doing so in the least. This is a book I will return to over the years, just as The Licorice Daughter, A New Film About a Woman in Love with the Dead, Before It's Light, or any of the other Lifshins I own. *** ½
(And for the record, as far as I'm concerned, a leg's a leg unless it's sitting in the front window of a house in Cleveland with a lampshade on it.)
Rated by buyers -
Lyn Lifshin's Another Woman Who Looks Like Me is a brilliant tour de force
that mesmerizes the reader. These exquisitely crafted poems encompass a wide range of subjects that include growing up female, the heartbreaking beauty of horses, mother/daughter relationships, erotic love--all interwoven with Lifshin's lyrical, velvet voice that is at times so daring and candid that the immediacy is breathtaking. For me, not reading Another Woman Who Looks Like Me would be the equivalent if one were a fan of fiction of not reading the most recent novel of Philip Roth.
Review by Laura Boss, Editor:Lips poetry magazine
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