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Late Empire
Olstein here meditates on a world gone awry, limning in precise, beautifully modulated language both personal dislocation and the slings and arrows visited upon the community at large. Generally, the personal and the communal link and even merge. VERDICT: Sharp, approachable work for most readers.
―Library Journal
This timely yet elemental collection from Olstein (Little Stranger) unfolds where the exigencies and distractions of daily life brush up against the political, the ethical, and the existential…Olstein’s profound and attentive poems reveal her formal dexterity and knack for spotting modernity’s absurdities: “Some days even business as usual seems rare.”
―Publishers Weekly
In Late Empire, the poet throws herself into a disturbing discussion about 21st-century realities, pinpointing, questioning, and exhorting. It’s a riveting picture of the micro, day-to-day busy-ness against the macro, overshadowing struggle of existential survival… Olstein is a master of poetic syntax. Her words paint fresh, beautiful images, as in “Glitter-spilled stars / velvet the gaze,” or “The foot / of the lake meets the mouth of the river.” Her sensitive lens focuses on our most basic dreams and fears.
―Rain Taxi
In her fourth book―a gorgeous call-to-arms in the face of our current social and political conditions―Lisa Olstein employs her signature wit, wordplay, candor, and absurdity in poems that are her most personal―and political―to date. Like a brilliant dinner conversation that ranges from animated discussions of politics, philosophy, and religion to intimate considerations of motherhood, friendship, and eros, Olstein’s voice is immediately approachable yet uncomfortably at home in the American empire.
―Prairie Schooner
Very highly recommended... Olstein's poetry ranges from animated discussions of politics, philosophy, and religion, to intimate considerations of motherhood, friendship, and eros.
―Midwest Book Review
Stunningly crafted… What is brilliant and provocative about Olstein’s work is that she fully acknowledges the impossibility of forgetting a conceptual framework that has been fully internalized, and the futility of fashioning something wholly new. Rather, she realizes that the rules of language must be questioned, interrogated, and revised from within. What is fascinating about Late Empire is that Olstein does not merely offer critique, but begins the difficult work of creating an alternative space, an understanding of language that allows for the hypothetical, the disruptive, the utopian.
―The Literary Review
Olstein prompts us to consider the ways in which we search the archive when the language of the present moment falls short, particularly when attempting to convey sublime experience, the “singing” of the senses upon witnessing a transcendent moment. Yet Olstein also upholds the necessity of transforming the archive, and in doing so, transfiguring our definitions of beauty and possibility.
―OmniVerse
Late Empire is a capacious and anxious collection, as it must be, and it continues to manifest Olstein’s characteristic poetic strengths. Her pliable syntax wends through cognition until it ends up, frequently, in metacognition. Her observing eye, in its efforts to record perception, is keyed to its phenomenological blind spots, even as it alights on zoological curiosities (the migrating eye of a flounder, for example). Formal control of the line constrains a tone that is always on the verge of an outburst of ecopoetic panic (I say that admiringly). The predicament of the post-Romantic nature poet, mired in imperial imagination in spite of herself, presents itself again and again.
―Poetry International