Thomas David Lisk

These Beautiful Limits (Free Verse Editions) Thomas David Lisk

Poetry. The poems in THESE BEAUTIFUL LIMITS delight in the transparency-and the obliquity-of language. Invested with a "jocoserious" sensibility, they explore the borders of language to see the ways in which language defines identity--not merely the language of meditation and philosophical inquiry, but also the quotidian language of everyday life that hovers on the edge of forgetfulness. The collection, which culminates in a long poem, "Hemp Quoits," takes as its premise the assumption that the borders of identity are permeable with all the languages the self encounters on a daily basis. The poems value mobility and freedom, yet they recognize that we transact our affairs within borders--the body, the mind, the poem, the sentence, the phrase, the word.