Silent Treatment
1997

In poems at once dauntless and thoughtful, Lisa Lewis reveals the unspoken thoughts, hidden fears, and secret desires of a contemporary woman. She reminisces about the lost joys of childhood (“I was one of those girls who grew up / Loving horses, but now I can’t afford to ride. . . .”), writes movingly of her mother’s last days in a nursing home, and offers a witty recap of a visit to old college friends (“They’re good people, I just can’t stand to be near them. . . .”). Stanley Plumly writes, “Rilke once said that poetry is one silence speaking to another silence. The poems in Silent Treatment seem anything but that–yet their large meditating presences live within a great still space, within a passionate need to speak and a palpable fear of not being heard. The longing in Lisa Lewis’s poems is real not only in the full narrative argument of her lines but in the mindful ambivalence she feels about her body–its sexuality, mortality, earth-transcendence. It is as if she were trying to write her way into silence as well as finding her way from silence, and this is that poetry.”

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