Distinguished Office of Echoes - by Lisa Olstein (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A collection of poems by Lisa Olstein"--

Book Synopsis

From renderings of sea creatures to maps of ancient battles, Olstein's latest collection engages the archive, transforming what it reveals about the body, language, and time.

A collection of three collage-, cutout, and erasure-based poems, Distinguished Office of Echoes leans into the intersection of word and image, exploring the revelatory language they make together. Each sequence uses an antique reference book as its source text: an 1865 study of marine invertebrates becomes an exploration of physical death and the disorientation of sudden loss; an 1865 proto-medical textbook journeys into the eerie dislocations of illness; and a 1905 primer on ancient Greek history investigates human and geologic time, time of war versus the time of rivers. Olstein brings a combination of reverence and irreverence, wit and tenderness to these archival texts--their taxonomies and lexicons, assumptions and elisions--casting a feminist gaze on outdated histories while discovering new intimacies in their midst. Charged with the magnetic pull of material fascination, each poem enters into and reinvents the realm of its source, undertaking a practice of excavation, collaboration, and transformation to reimagine the field of the page while reconsidering what it means to examine and to be examined.

Review Quotes

Praise for Distinguished Office of Echoes

"Lisa Olstein did not compose Distinguished Office of Echoes, her sixth collection of poetry, at a desk, nor did she write it with pen or keyboard. Instead, each poem was revealed, almost like a sculpture hidden inside stone. . . . She may have had to destroy her source material in the process of creating this astonishing work, but I prefer to think those books have been transubstantiated rather than desecrated. Olstein's care for the original reference books never falters, and she approaches her work with the reverence of a biologist-harvesting and dissecting a specimen to reveal new understandings of life."--Benjamin Samuel, BOMB

Praise for Lisa Olstein

"An accomplished poet, she often uses language beautifully and inventively."--The New York Times

"Is she just smarter about syntax, more articulate about human drama, more imaginative about eeriness, more insightful about sadness, more capable of turning a novel phrase, more engaging a storyteller than nearly all the rest of her peers? Well, yes."--The Huffington Post

"Olstein's profound and attentive poems reveal her formal dexterity and knack for spotting modernity's absurdities"--Publishers Weekly

"Tenderness, then, is a form of resistance. It allows Olstein to create intimacy on the page not only among those who inhabit these poems, but also in those of us reading them . . . With this book, Olstein has declared herself a poet worth watching"--Eric Smith, The Rumpus

"Olstein places the mystical next to the mundane, bees next to bricklayers, purple finches next to garage doors, reason next to faith, chance near fate. She explodes theories of cause and effect and expands our notions of logic, symbolism, and the territory between dreams and waking experience."--The Growler Poetry Review

"Sharp, approachable work for most readers."--The Library Journal

"Brilliant and provocative . . . Olstein realizes that the rules of language must be questioned, interrogated, and revised from within."--The Literary Review

About the Author

Lisa Olstein is the author of six poetry collections and two books of nonfiction. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Residency Fellowship, Hayden Carruth Award, and Writers League of Texas Award. She is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.