Description
Loisa Fenichell’s daring debut collection steers us in all directions of wanting, at once loyal to the freedoms of the body to wander yet fixed by an obsessive pull towards home. Through the many shifting scenes on this journey, from NY to CA to places inwardly, Fenichell’s stylistic versatility is impressive as she moves between verse, prose, and photographs that “sing desire” and traverse the “ghosted edges” of longing. These are poems that marvel and lust, that regret and reach, from a poet intent on witnessing and translating the poignant distances of deep love and connected grief. In the end, Fenichell casts her sensual lens on “an open field,” a space of triumphant self-reckoning at the threshold of hope.
-Stacie Cassarino, author of Each Luminous Thing and Zero at the Bone
Wandering In All Directions Of This Earth is a remarkably beautiful book. These are poems of loneliness and wandering, but also of connection and immense joy. Fenichell doesn’t shy away from the world, even as it overwhelms, and the gift this brings to the reader is the most elusive and important of all—hope.
-Lynn Melnick, author of I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive
The sentences in Loisa Fencihell’s aptly named Wandering In All Directions Of This Earth enact a journey at once outward and inward, an odyssey through urban and bucolic spaces, across dreamlike bridges “that lead to more bridges,” backward and forward in time, and deeper into the fathomless self. A leg that begins in darkest extremity might pirouette into technicolor whimsy; grief and loneliness give way to a richness of language; an privation and pain find magical answers via metaphor’s deranging escape route from the harshness of the real: “I fainted/ and convulsed, so found myself a small red boat,/ like the booths of a diner, in which to sail away.” If poetic quicksilver lightens her path, the poet is likewise haunted by the fear that nothing (and no one, not even the self) stays or stabilizes long enough to set root in completely and call one’s own. The truth of this exuberant, crushing book is that only the fixity of the written page—analogous to that of its photographs—offers us evidence of who we (or another) might be or have been, and of what it feels or felt like to be here, alive on this earth, if only for a time.
-Timothy Donnelly, author of Chariot and The Problem of the Many
