Winner of the 2021 Idaho Prize!
“This is a terrific book of poems.” — Ilya Kaminsky
“Lisa Allen Ortiz’s Stem should come with a warning label. These poems might stick to your hair, get under your fingernails, slide under your ribs, infiltrate your comfort zone. They might stun you with the strangeness of being an animal called human, lure you into the eyes of trees, dismay you with evidence of your kinship with dirt and death. Ortiz deconstructs the ordinary syntax of language and life, and uses the bits to articulate the cries and murmurs of owls, grasses, flowers, streets, whale bones, and the body’s own wild desires and hungers. In this way, bypassing our deadening habit of making sense, and as in the fairy tale where the river reeds whisper who killed the child, these poems bring us unsettling news of the unbearable fragility of the world, of terrible secrets buried deep in childhood, or in our own viscera of longing and bewilderment at the shock of mortality. The warning label should read: You will never be the same after this book. You will enter a radical, gritty, gorgeous luminosity from which you will not recover.”
Frances Hatfield, PhD, poetry editor for Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche, author of Rudiments of Flight: Poems, senior training analyst, C. G. Jung Institutes of Santa Fe and San Francisco.
Selected poems of Blanca Varela
Winner of the 2022 Northern California Book Award California Translation Prize
“Twelve years after her death, Lisa Allen Ortiz and Sara Daniele Rivera offer us this glimpse into a long and teeming encounter with black Varela. Their translations, nothing short of devotions, carry a flaring, complex, compressed and spacious lyric forged in time by time.” —Aracelis Girmay
Winner of the 2016 Perugia Press Prize!
“These poems come to you urgent, rushing and controlled from a wide-open heart. A splendid debut.” — Thomas Lux
“In language that is spare, precise, and at times wonderfully, subtly strange, Ortiz works in the overlap between self and world, showing us that time does not honor human consciousness, nor even recognize it. Yet the world is all we have, and what we are is part of it. We are not its masters, and the attempt to hold onto things by saving, describing, and labeling them, is doomed. We’ll lose what we love. This hard-won understanding is the tough heart of this piercing, memorable book, which, like any memorial, is simultaneously a celebration of life and an elegy.” — Chase Twichell
Self Portrait as a Clock
Finishing Line Press, 2013
“Don’t let the gorgeous music, with its echoes of Plath and Dickinson, soothe you; these are elegant, unnerving snapshots— both praise and lament— of what A. R. Ammons calls poetry’s one real subject: ‘impermanence…'” —Catherine Barnett
Turns Out
Main Street Rag Press, 2011
“These are poems whose relics are at once fantastical and familiar, secretly hopeful and sensuously rich, that illuminate the profound, tenuous truth we may always have suspected, but before reading Lisa’s poems didn’t quite know how to voice: we are ‘lightly connected/ to everything.'” — Robin Ekiss
Lisa Allen Ortiz 