Out of the Question: Selected Poems (1963–2003)
“I have the highest hopes for this long-overdue book: that it introduces Lewis Warsh’s inimitable mode—his sharpness and humility, his humor and generosity, his rare emotional intelligence—to as many new readers as are ready; that it satiates others who, like me, have always wondered why Lewis’s isn’t already a household name; and that it teaches us all something about living a life long on poetry and love, in which “desire overcomes inertia, but the stones survive.”
“In this Out of the Question world, you never quite know where you’re heading or where you’re going to end up, though you quickly realize you’re in the hands of a master. Toeing no party-line, Lewis Warsh has absorbed—for his own use and the life of the form—all that he has been immersed in and surrounded by, sounding out a life, of personhood, of being. The inexorable logic of these poems clears the ground before them, creating the most real fictions imaginable. Having this collection in hand, culled from forty years of work, gives us a chance to dwell in the achievement.”
“For more than half a century, Lewis Warsh has worked on a quietly glorious body of work. At turns nakedly confessional, wildly paratactic, and cooly Whitmanic, his poetry tests the limits of the form with singular grace and humor. As the poems in Out of the Question reveal, Warsh’s ear is tuned precisely to capture and celebrate the variousness of our vulnerable, desiring—and desirable—selves.”
