These Pages Once Were Skin
Laurie Price
ISBN 978-1-963908-06-0 82 pages $18.00
Propulsive yet indeterminate is
the wondrous and suspenseful sense of these poems. Speaking the
multilemma of living in these times where everything seems to be
slipping away and at the same time converging in tsunamis of cataclysmic
disaster, the poems are intimate and yet abstract, embodied but
evanescent: a phenomenological study, perhaps, of our minds in the
Anthropocene, scrambling for certainty but embracing our lack thereof.
Acquiescent inner rebellion laced with biting humor astutely observes
the calamities swirling around the globe. “What if I say I am a perfect
violation/of what’s expected of me?” These pages that once were skin
will be skin again, always singing like the drowned girl’s bone in the
old ballad, turned into a flute that wails the story of her death.
Dazzling word-dances lead us to intuit a way forward in accepting both a
pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of language! You go, grrrl!
Maria Damon
Laurie Price’s These Pages Once Were Skin shows an intelligence that is beautiful in the writing of it. She
reaches as far as she can grasp, images and thought-images as if tangent
to an unmarked center. There is no map. Her inner life observes her
sensorium and its own self. She examines uneasiness as if it were a
process. And she knows when to cool down her rhetoric. Poems like these
are events of learning.
John Godfrey
A poet of her own dimension and originality—elegant, philosophical, wise—Laurie Price’s perceptions are heroically
true to a language in poetry she crafts and adores. She is with the
words. We ride inside a rippling sense of place (perhaps a veranda) with
balanced yet complex feeling, admiring her precision and inspiring
self-reliance, a composure in her poems and their “look,” not begging
any obsession of self. A wonderful visual artist, as well, who works
with the intricate tools that field demands, Price has crossed many
borders. She knows how to skillfully recognize and organize the beauties
and desires of her own existence. Clearly, an “old soul.” “What type of
sentences did you have in mind” one poem asks. Pleasure, texture,
memory, luminosity, construction, light, dream, lace, paper, a broken
window, others and intimacy, conversation, skin. “The world in the word
in the work is the work.” Just what we all need. “…. zero surprising
all/ of me, evening, the tree.” I love her “salamander heart.”
Anne Waldman
Reading Laurie Price
one steps into a vibrant continuum. Inner and outer worlds, animate and
inanimate objects, body, language, and landscape glow and flow,
careening into each other. Price has an artist’s eye for texture, color,
and pattern, “I mix the green and blue with another town which is
memory./ Fire burns with dreamy intensity.” Her poems are scored to a
fractal logic where meanings metamorphose and connotations gather and
scatter. This work enables us to experience the anarchy of everyday
life, both exhilarating and terrifying. “The journey is never on the
map/ the journey is never the map,” but somewhere else. The journey is
the poem. Hop on for the adventure!
Elaine Equi
Laurie Price is a poet we poets should have been clamoring for these last three decades. Her work
operates in the here and now with the tools of up there and way deep.
She is a high-grade lyric philosopher, metallic and transcendent. The
sound of her verse is barbed wire and angelic wind. If you know her art
work you know what mysteries she uncovers in the public disorder,
magical crafts, and guerilla graffiti of Mexico. I find those images
alchemically refined in her poetry. Her work is like Mina Loy’s, a
surprise to my word-jaded reading—and hopefully not just mine.
Andrei Codrescu
Laurie Price is a poet
and visual artist who was in the first graduating class at Naropa’s
(then Institute) Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1981 and
has since published poetry and made and exhibited her visual art
(laurie-price.com). Courtesy of a generous year-long Gerbode Foundation
Poetry grant received in 1993 she moved to Oaxaca, Mexico to begin her
life as a citizen of the world. Since then she’s lived in Morocco,
Spain, and now resides in Oaxaca, Mexico (since 2013). Two full-length
collections (Except for Memory [Pantograph Press, Berkeley, CA, 1993]
and Radio at Night: Recent and Selected Work [Lunar Chandelier Press,
2013] and four chapbooks have been published. Her work has appeared in
Talisman, Eoagh, HOW2, Big Allis, Arshile, The East Village and Fence,
among other magazines.
http://graciouseconomiesandcorrugatedshadows.blogspot.com(2009-2022)
and here:
https://graciouseconomiesandetc2.blogspot.com/(current).