Lisa Low, Replica: Poems

 

Forty Years

My mother calls to tell me she’s comfortable with white people now after all these years in America. I put her on speakerphone like she wants me to for my health. At her bible study, she says, she tells them she doesn’t see color, can talk to anyone now. Around the circle, all seven white women, to Black women, and an Asian—she describes—laugh and clap for her. I get carried away adding red curtains and a judges’ panel. The phone muffles her. Louder, I say. I can talk to anyone now, she repeats. I replace anyone with white people, as if a white person had taught me to.

From Chicago poet Lisa Low comes the full-length debut, Replica: Poems (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2026), a title that follows on the heels of the chapbook Crown for the Girl Inside (Portland OR: YesYes Books, 2023), winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. Offering first-person declarations on cultural and familial space, “observations of racism, and the slipperiness of nostalgia,” Low articulates layers of inside, outside, around and through with smart and sly lyrics. “Although you yourself chose to be with a tall white man,” she writes, as part of the extended prose poem sequence, “People Who Look Like You,” “you don’t like the idea that some of your power comes from him. You want your own power to be enough. You want to call this love, not power. But the world doesn’t always agree. Is it so much to ask the world to see your world the way you do?” An assemblage of sharp, subtle and self-aware lines, the poems of Replica hold intriguing rhythms; lines that thrust and parry, dodge; a lightness that neither denies nor refuses their weight. She explores form, yet manages to not be constrained by those forms, each new exploration an opening into further possibility. “One day when I didn’t want to hurt / myself,” begins the poem “Aubade,” a sonnet subtitled “with a visit to Krohn Conservatory,” “just not be here for a while, we left / ourphones at home to look at flowers. / In the car, I wanted to press my eyelids / to the frosted window but instead I looked / ahead like I’d been trying to.”

Held in four numbered cluster-sections of poems, what intrigues, as well, are the occasional poems that play with old standards, offering her own “Aubade,” “Palinode” and an “Ode to Armpit Hair,” as well as two separate “Ars Poetica,” playing her own fresh takes on familiar modes. The array of formal invention is slyly done, far more engaged with classical structure than the poems might first let on, allowing the poems to speak for themselves, over how they may have been built. “My younger self dreams of a potato-chip-flavored kiss in a poem I no longer like,” she writes, to open the first stanza of the first of this pair of “Ars Poetica” pieces, “now several years old. All-American kisses occurred in lives where sleeping with your hair wet was also permitted, where the attention of American mothers cast a soft glow through the house and clicked off at night. I filled the poem with slippery ponytails.”