Lesle Lewis, John’s Table: poems

 

Lake

Doctors say you have only weeks yet.

You go early to bed and draw meadows.

One day remembers a better one as she crawls out of consciousness.

Whatever happens happens now.

Red painted monuments bloom.

It’s a messy, wild-growing grief.

One child ventures out, the child, lovely and bespeckled, the child, a powerhouse, the child grows up, a person capable and remarkable.

Then the ocean comes for the land.

Drought is causing the reappearance of the canyon.

And of the split level house on a lake.

The latest from Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany’s recently-founded publishing enterprise, Piżama Press, “an independent press dedicated to showcasing and uplifting the voices of the strange, the uncanny, the absurd, and the surreal,” is John’s Table: poems (2026) by American poet Lesle Lewis. Self-described as a poet who “lives in the rough New Hampshire woods with the rest of the trees,” Lewis is the author of five prior full-length poetry collections: Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011), A Boot’s a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014) and Rainy Days on the Farm (Hudson NY: Fence Books, 2020), winner of The Ottoline Prize [see my review of such here]. Lewis, therefore, is not merely an experienced writer, but one who moves with the quiet confidence of a master, attending the intimate, the small, almost working a tone and tenor, a slow unfolding of a dense and lyric narrative, comparable to the prose details of American writer and translator Lydia Davis. “I’m always working.” begins the poem “Braver,” “I should pause more often. // But to think about not sleeping is not to sleep. // And sleeping takes too long.”

Each poem throughout Lewis’ John’s Table hold single-word titles, hinting at the precision to come, despite whatever broad sweeps and strokes lines might take; each poem simultaneously a kind of moment, singularly caught, as well as a meditation on and around the poem’s subject, much of which is offered through those single-word titles. “I ask myself to give myself.” Lewis writes, to close the poem “Need.” “My intention is to work but the work has no intention. // You photograph the photograph and then photoshop it. // You go to the paint store, the drug store, the cannabis dispensary and buy what you need.” Her poems revel in what appear to be small motions that hold turns and twists and turns, accumulating lines that offer straight lines of narrative but somehow bend and dodge as they continue. There is such incredible density and lightness, such nimble patter within the short spaces of these poems. The graceful assemblage of John’s Table offer sleek poems that defy expectation, articulating a book-length suite of fleeting moments of mortality (a thread throughout that begins to form around illness and the body, however subtle), all of which she holds in conceptual space; fleeting moments, all the more sweet for their brevity.

Pioneers

I’m sorry that I can’t give you more goodness.

The little I have, I need to keep for myself.

And I still live in this situation of my body.

The horizon stretches across all the body.

The solar panels are in their upright winter position.

The red pipe cleaner, our central theme, the other pipe cleaners wrap around.

Pieces of the old truths in the new spiritual lands are tree stumps around the cabins of the pioneers.