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Little Stranger
Beautifully crafted and unsettling in just the right way, these poems track a poet of growing importance.
―Library Journal
Olstein leads us by the ear into the body’s deeper intimacies. These elegiac poems accumulate, repeat, echo, and rhyme, as if trying to harness some incantatory power in language, as if doing so might stave off the inevitable… Tenderness, then, is a form of resistance. It allows Olstein to create intimacy on the page not only among those who inhabit these poems, but also in those of us reading them… With this book, Olstein has declared herself a poet worth watching.
―The Rumpus
Lisa Olstein writes the sort of poetry tens of thousands of poets are even now, in bolt holes and cubbyholes across America, trying to write, and she writes it better than almost any of them. Is she just smarter about syntax, more articulate about human drama, more imaginative about eeriness, more insightful about sadness, more capable of turning a novel phrase, more engaging a storyteller than nearly all the rest of her peers? Well, yes. Read this startlingly engrossing book and see for yourself.
―Huffington Post
Taut, sonically driven and darkly funny.
―The Volta
Lisa Olstein’s third book, Little Stranger, has a traveling shape, one that augments and condenses thematic currents as one reads, with poems that build from past poems and open secret chambers within subsequent poems. Throughout, her poems are rapid and direct, her syntactical complexity is measured with precise sketches of actual life, torqued by metaphorical dexterity... leaping, blurring, multifaceted, vertiginous poems that complicate and perhaps ridicule the simple ache in the simple heart.
―Black Warrior Review
In her third collection, Olstein considers nature, faith, motherhood, and even the media with authority… Companionship may be found in nature, Olstein suggests, but epiphanies are just as difficult to achieve there as within interpersonal relationships. In “Different Habitats Make for Good Neighbors,” a metaphysical take on Frost, Olstein offers a somewhat predictable scene of a nighttime forest, then stuns the reader with questions about faith that streak like comets through the poem. Olstein’s repetitions of images and words become echoes of a fierce conversation with the universe. These lines from one the collection’s strongest poems aptly describe the collection’s cumulative effect: “Hit something hard, hit something soft, / sit by a glowing window and watch / the lighted storm swim by.”
―Book List
Early in this third collection, Olstein announces: “I am hopeful, and the hopeful seek/ the hopeless, a level always/ in need of rising.” This uncertain balance between hope and hopelessness, fear and fascination, breaks the calm surface of her poems… Olstein uses this inflection as a thin shield against life’s urgency and bewildering circumstance.
―Publisher’s Weekly
In Little Stranger, Lisa Olstein’s poems are concerned with the tension between the public and the personal and how the former bullies its way into the latter. Olstein’s book is both provoked into existence and inspired by our contemporary moment. Its urgency makes sense when one sees Little Stranger as a book that is responding to the twilight of privacy… Olstein’s humility is her greatest quality because apathy, wherever it multiplies, hopes to quiet us, and her poems simply do the hard work to make sense of those pressures, but on a personal level, with a voice we recognize as genuine.
―New Books in Poetry