Lissa Wolsak

Self-taught poet, essayist, and goldsmith Lissa Wolsak calls her poems “nested spherics.” She described the link between her metalwork and poetry to Kent Johnson in Vert magazine, stating, “I’m intoxicated by fire, light traveling through color, integrity of materials and making something where there was nothing … I love the overpowering silence involved.”

Wolsak’s long poems tug at the constraints of syntax and word, showing how the relation to form shapes experience. “Call it liminal or chora, call it the cloud of unknowing, it is a domain that is ethical, mystical, pedagogical, spiritual, and profoundly etymological,” Hank Lazer wrote in a review of Wolsak’s Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994–2005. He added, “Wolsak in her poetry asks, what are we, and can we learn to feel ourselves assembling our perceived world? And, might we learn ways to assemble it differently, with greater mercy and justice?”

Wolsak’s books include lightsail (2018), Of Beings Alone (2015), Pen Chants: Or Nth or 12 Spirit-Like Impermanences (2000), and The Garcia Family Co-Mercy (1994), as well as the poetic essay An Heuristic Prolusion (2000). Critical essays on Wolsak’s work appear in The Poetic Front: The Lissa Wolsak Issue (2011) and Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada (2008).

She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.