Lisa Fishman’s latest collection, One Big Time, is a stunning articulation of the author’s “journey-in-place” in the environs around a one-room cabin in Northeastern Ontario over a period of fourteen days in quarantine. Here is the author at her most exacting and exploratory, in poems that hew with lyric precision to the immediate physical and geologic environment. At the same time, language is an alert, mobile life-form in active investigation of what one thinks one understands, and of where one thinks one is. While the poet quests daily for a passageway from one body of water into another, words live in other words (“the hemlock / is a he / today”), and acrostics are illuminations: s-w-i-m is “sleek widening instant’s magnet.” Surprised by joy, these biocentric poems offer a way of being in the world with wonder and rigor––attentive enough to be lost, unknowing enough to be changed.
