AVENUE OF ESCAPE by LEWIS WARSH

24. AVENUE OF ESCAPE. New York, NY: Long News Books, 1995. 5½x8" 104 pages. (P)

Offset, perfect-bound paperback. Black-and-white cover by Yvonne Jacquette. 

“A collection of poems from the early-nineties. I had begun working on the long fragmented poems, like the title poem, which were later collected in The Origin of the World. Also, I began writing multi-part poems, like ‘Different Trains,’ something that I’m still doing, linking disparate sections (often written at different times, sometimes years apart) into a whole, or something that resembles a whole. The poem that interests me most, ‘Maybe You Can Define Love In Terms of What It Isn’t’ ends with a long letter from my old friend Allegra David written in 1984 and which acts as a follow-up to the letters by her which I included in The Maharajah’s Son. Inclusiveness and juxtaposition and open-endedness are the guiding ideas, I think. I was trying not to leave anything out. The book also includes a long poem, ‘By the Fire,’ a kind of memoir of life in Bolinas 25 years before. The book was published by Barbara Henning’s Long News Books with blurbs by Robin Blaser, Chris Tysh and Andrei Codrescu. The book is dedicated to Wang Ping.” (LW)