The Radiant

In The Radiant, Lise Goett renders a music whose profound reckoning is of the poet’s own determinations between a life of the mind and the physical world. The poems here orchestrate both the painful and rapturous particulars of a consciousness in the fires of transformation when faced, on the one hand, with individual mortality and demise; and on the other, with the fierce disquiet that haunts humanity given the slow-motion proximity of planetary extinction. The contradictory fears and desires that drive such understanding—capable of expressing the “distortions that arise from the experience of the body’s limitations and its abuse”—can account likewise for “bodies of all things being born into this world under a sign of error, / of negation, as they are being erased,” but not without the bliss of natural phenomena and language “caught in an updraft.”

—Roberto J. Tejada, author of Why the Assembly Disbanded

Like the visions glimpsed in dreams, or maybe even spiritual revelation, the poems of The Radiant are both rare and bent on assigning language to the most illusive human experiences. And what language this is—lush, tensile, probing and even wild in its linguistic prowess, Lise Goett sounds like no other American poet, as no one else is as refined, as strange, as original. Often addressed to the second person “you,” these poems move us through a geography of spirit, involving us in their stories, implicating us in their emotional tumult, all while giving us the opportunity to see that which is holy in the mundane, and expand our ideas of how poems work, what a poem can say and contain. The Radiant is a moving, luminous and visionary book, and Lise Goett is a poet at the height of her powers.

—Mark Wunderlich, author of The God of Nothingness

A glimmering intelligence beats at the heart of The Radiant. It’s not the condescending kind that disallows humor (or how to account for the witty “milk of amnesia”?). It certainly doesn’t frown at sensuality, of either body (“the bliss of flesh / called astonishment”) or language (“feasting … / on gooseberries & cracklings of crispened flesh & fat”). Nor does it think it’s above a one-two punch of imagery (“the face of a Geisha / painted in the rice powder make-up of moonlight”). No, it’s… a learned but lissome, carnal yet soulful, singular kind of intelligence, here in grown-up poems for grown-up readers, and it keeps one eye on mortality and the other on the delights of this world. Breathe deep, and take the plunge!

—Albert Goldbarth