Lisa Russ Spaar

Biography

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author/editor of more than ten books of poetry and criticism, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (Persea, 2021) and a novel, Paradise Close (Persea, 2022). Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she has taught since 1993. 

http://www.engl.virginia.edu/people/lrs9e

See Work

POETRY / Winter 2022

Up

By Lisa Russ Spaar

“Up!” she signals, syllabic cup
     meaning wherever I am now—up
or down—floor, high chair—change direction!—

POETRY / Winter 2022

Drunk Piñata

By Lisa Russ Spaar

If you were to shoulder a heavy bat
& beat one today, many decades after—

POETRY / Winter 2022

Stuck!

By Lisa Russ Spaar

Crucial early bark
   to learn, like dat?
Or no! The wooden ball

POETRY / Winter 2022

Scary

By Lisa Russ Spaar

Ancestral or learned, such threats, 
   tonight’s charry staircase of heaven—
crash, storming, splitting flicker shards,

POETRY / Fall 2019

Bill Evansesque Madrigal

By Lisa Russ Spaar

Quartal voicings, the alcohols. 
Swallows in a martini sky, jigsawed

POETRY / Fall 2019

Asian Pear Madrigal

By Lisa Russ Spaar

The blushed syllable it wore 
with its whole body,
tawny rose-hip orb
of antique origin,

POETRY / Fall 2019

You Better Think Madrigal

By Lisa Russ Spaar

“Think,” Aretha Franklin and Ted White, Aretha Now, Atlantic, 1968

POETRY / Fall 2019

Magnolia Cone Madrigal

By Lisa Russ Spaar

Primitive angiosperm, genus 
prior even to bees,

POETRY / Fall 2019

Falling Stars Madrigal

By Lisa Russ Spaar

Famously late, light reaches us
eons past its own extinction,

POETRY / Fall 2019

Box Turtle Madrigal

By Lisa Russ Spaar

Early mystery,
out of what century