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The Collected Poems of Lyx Ish

aka Elizabeth Was

Introduction by Maria Damon,

Cover by Liaizon Wakest 2016. 6x9, 125 pages

ISBN-10: 1-93668-702-X | ISBN-13: 978-1-93668-702-2 >> Download pdf

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Includes the books:

Pink Shot (1984), Onion Leaves, Her Map Untended (1986), Onanism Curdles (1985), and the long poem Every Lines Other (1985-1995).

from the introduction:

In all registers of life, as she transitioned from Elizabeth Perl Nasaw to Liz Was to Lyx Ish, the writer of the works assembled here strove for liberation, primarily of the imagination in its myriad manifestations, but also freedom from enslavement to exploitive economic systems, sexist body politics and domestic arrangements– ultimately, freedom from a separate self, and freedom to play with the unknown. But over and beyond that, she embodied that goal, which is more properly a process, for the many others she included in her vast raying-out of warmth and influence. The other great and related theme is relationality itself, which is the freedom from separateness: the “bean being bean” that is also being earth, water, air and heat(fire). Her writings, collected here by loving survivors mIEKAL aND and Liaizon Wakest, sparkle with the interplay of her many primal roles: artist, mother, lover, daughter, friend–a “woman” and multi-artist in constant multilogue with those categories–in language that romps and tumbles over itself in gleeful fulfillment of utopian (or, as she writes, “oputian,” acknowledging the never-perfect, ever-mutable nature of attempted utopias) intimations.

—Maria Damon