Long Corridor

Winner of the 2008 Keystone Chapbook Prize. Selected by G. C. Waldrep: “Some selves present as halls of mirrors, but for Lisa Sewell, the poetic self—the lyric self, the speaking I—inhabits a hall of texts, a palace of moments in which personal experience resonates literally with someone else’s story. From Murder on the Orient Express to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Little House in the Big Woods to The Corrections, texts become sites against which a speaking self fragments, then constellates again as a sort of negative image through which the exigencies of our historical moment come into sharp focus. In these poems, King Lear and Ellis Island are joined at the spine, Iraq and Wharton’s House of Mirth, New Orleans and Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. These lyrics suggest that in the end it may not be literature that haunts our lives, but our lives that haunt the longer, stranger, more oblique life of Literature.”