In One Form To Find Another

Poetry. Women’s Studies. Winner of the 2016 CSU Poetry Center Open Book Prize. “IN ONE FORM TO FIND ANOTHER is an heroically unsettling and compelling textual reenactment of feminine embodiments’ lament, contemplation and recalibration of disturbed histories irrevocably intertwined with traumatic experience. In intense, palpable language, Lewty lays bare the somatic registers of complex and fraught circumstances that cling to the body as sensory framework, muscle memory and ‘non-bearing loads.’ This momentous and powerful book evokes feminist theory and practice, psychoanalytic discourse, and unflinching lyric to render the inscrutable territory of trauma tangible and perceptible. With each nuanced register Lewty cultivates a body politic of powerful disclosure and release.” —Brenda Iijima

“This is how we feel: the body remembers what the mind wants to forget. Inexplicable physical symptoms—indirect translations of traumatic past events—are rendered into language on medical message boards. In turn, these poems are mysterious lexical symptoms that connect words to feeling. Lewty’s book is an inventory of intensity.” —Jena Osman

“‘The past is not gone, but here, hectic, impatient.’ IN ONE FORM TO FIND ANOTHER presents the meditative poem as agitated case study or transforms case studies into exquisite poetry, opening the question of what it means, now, to attempt to know. Wise about the many ways we are ‘dismantled by memory and want,’ overwhelmed by inadequate explanations, and restlessly looking for a way to tell the dancer from ‘a trance-state where you stop and turn, correct and rebuild,’ the poet returns us to writing’s origin as address (‘Dear Grapheme’), involving her reader intimately in the making of meaning. In this collection one form of memory (traumatic, embodied) is used to build a dwelling ‘wherein attachment can occur.’ I am in love with Lewty’s lyric brilliance and attracted to this book as ‘I am attracted to any real place…’” —Laura Mullen