Salt Lake Community College poet laureate and professor Lisa
Bickmore recently released her latest book of poetry, titled Ephemerist. She will read from her new
book Aug. 24, 7 p.m. at The King’s English Bookshop and Oct. 26, 7 p.m. at
Westminster College’s Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business auditorium.
Bickmore's
poems and video work have appeared in numerous publications, including Quarterly
West, Tar River Poetry, Caketrain, Sugarhouse Review, The Moth, Terrain,
Mapping Salt Lake City, and Southword. Her literary awards include
the prestigious Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize for 2015 for her piece
“Eidolon,” the 2014 Antivenom Prize for her second book, flicker, and the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award in the
Literary Arts in 2008. She
is one of the founders of SLCC’s Publication Center, teaches poetry and writing,
and is the assistant associate dean for the SLCC English Department.
In Ephemerist, the speakers of the poems
imagine many provisional homes. They make a study of shelter: in the harbors of
memory; in art's forms and improvisations; in spirit houses; in the body. Each
proves transient. In these poems, each speaker finds that the places she thinks
she knows are, in the end, knowable only tangentially and partially, if at all.
Shelter is a pharmakon, a substance that is both medicine and toxin. The book
imagines, as substitution and remedy, a practice of making what cannot last,
what will always disappear, a practice that might be termed ephemerism.
"In
this collection, Ephemerist, Lisa
Bickmore takes articulate stock of much that is passing before her eyes, and
she presses both their presence and their passing for significance,” said poet
Scott Cairns, program director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Seattle
Pacific University and author of Slow
Pilgrim: The Collected Poems. “One happens upon brief consolations along
this journey through momentary matter, but the base note here is willingness,
the connective tissue is hope, and the last word is light.”
“There
is no perfect 'capturing' of a moment, whether in word or image, despite our
deeply human desire to fix the world in memory,” said Paisley Rekdal, poet and
U of U professor, and the recently named Poet Laureate of the State of Utah. “Thus
the elegant poems of Ephemerist simultaneously
celebrate and elegize, meditating on the uncomfortable relationship we've built
between earthly loss and spiritual gain: part of transcendence's paradox, which
depends upon our losing some part of the world we love in order to gain a
greater sense of it.”
“In
poem after penetrating poem, she tries, and—in language at once memorable in
its expressiveness and exact in its ability to describe what Bickmore sees and
feels—she succeeds, all the time attentive to the world outside herself and
sharply attuned to the inner lives of others,” said Portland-based poet Andrea
Hollander, author of Landscape with
Female Figure: New and Selected Poems. “Few books of poetry, once consumed,
leave me feeling 'emptied...of nearly every desire,' but Lisa Bickmore's fine
collection is filled so abundantly with aesthetically, intellectually, and
emotionally quenching poems that after my first journey through its pages, I
felt no need to do anything other than read the book again for its myriad
pleasures.”