LISA OLSTEIN

distinguished office of echoes

A collection of three collage-, cutout, and erasure-based poems, Distinguished Office of Echoes leans into the intersection of word and image, exploring the revelatory language they make together. Each sequence uses an antique reference book as its source text: an 1865 study of marine invertebrates becomes an exploration of physical death and the disorientation of sudden loss; an 1865 proto-medical textbook journeys into the eerie dislocations of illness; and a 1905 primer on ancient Greek history investigates human and geologic time, time of war versus the time of rivers. Olstein brings a combination of reverence and irreverence, wit and tenderness to these archival texts—their taxonomies and lexicons, assumptions and elisions—casting a feminist gaze on outdated histories while discovering new intimacies in their midst. Charged with the magnetic pull of material fascination, each poem enters into and reinvents the realm of its source, undertaking a practice of excavation, collaboration, and transformation to reimagine the field of the page while reconsidering what it means to examine and to be examined.

A riveting bookwork that re-enchants the meeting place of word and image while animating the intervals between the near and far. Both critical and playful in its methods, and inciting wonder from the pages of bygone volumes—on human history, the natural sciences—Distinguished Office of Echoes conjures a tactile intimacy from the past into an untimely present of haunting beauty. 
—Roberto Tejada

Forthcoming September 23, 2025 from Copper Canyon Press.