Description

Lois Hirshkowitz, who lives in New York City, is a founding editor and trustee of Barrow Street, has taught at the Writer’s Voice in New York City, and has worked as a New Jersey Poet-in-the-School and as a Dodge poet. In 1973 she founded an independent day school, Lakewood Prep, which she still ‘attends.’ She has published three books of poetry: Nurture & Torture (San Diego Poets Press, 1992), Marking Her Questions (Mellen Poetry Press, 1993), and Pan’s Daughters (Chi Chi Press, 1998).

There’s poetry in the very idea of p, the infinite number which shows us constancy of mathematical relationship. If you know the radius, p guarantees the circumference of a circle, and Lois Hirshkowitz guarantees us a remarkable radius of pleasure in these quirky, dream-like poems about the circumference of a life, and how to calculate it. Sounds abstract? It is, but this is a full-bodied abstraction with a sensuous apprehension of the world. Hirshkowitz’s poems are mature work in peak flower, radiant on the landscape of contemporary American letters.
—Molly Peacock