Little Stranger

Lisa Olstein

The poems in Little Stranger, Lisa Olstein’s third collection, reverberate with twinned realities: wonder and terror, beauty and difficulty, celebration and lament. Adventuring through worlds within worlds, the poet engages with science, art, war, and motherhood, and rolls out a child’s encyclopedia of animals—tiger, ibex, barasingha—while exploring the tenuousness of attachment and the rapidly shifting nature of knowledge. In poems that are erudite, lyrical, and above all empathetic, Olstein illuminates both the magic and the sorrow in our world.

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ISBN: 9781556594328

Format: Paperback

Elegy (In a distant room)

In a distant room
you are always dying.
 
We watch it come.
It comes slowly, in its way,
 
and with great speed.
In advance is like in retrospect:
 
past perfect, future perfect,
the imagined happening,
 
happening, happening.
Remove the visible world,
 
its crowds of guillemots
and auklets, its street signs
 
and stones. They promise
to offer less but longer.
 
We would take it but
in the end no offer is made.
 
There are measurements
too small to recognize,
 
imperatives too large to see.
All they find is a name.
 
Moonlight on the Strait of Juan
de Fuca finds night fish
 
and their glowing trails,
miniature Perseids in reverse.
 
As usual, cormorants
clean themselves bobbing
 
on the iron waves’ sway.
What is in a name?
 
Your name is carried on
the tongues that taste you
 
searching for the right word
temporarily mislaid.

About the Author

Lisa Olstein is the author of six poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone; Lost Alphabet; Little Stranger; Late Empire; Dream Apartment; and Distinguished Office of Echoes. Her nonfiction includes Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press/Dreamscape/Hanser), a book-length lyric essay on the intersection of pain, perception, and language; and Climate (Essay Press), an exchange of epistolary essays co-written with poet Julie Carr. Olstein is the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite, fronted by songwriter Jeffrey Foucault, and in 2025 Lost Alphabet for voice, five musicians, and electronics, an adaptation …

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Reviews

“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.” —Huffington Post

“Beautifully crafted and unsettling in just the right way, these poems track a poet of growing importance.” —Library Journal