Some Other Kind of Mission

Author: Lisa Jarnot

Publisher: Burning Deck Books (1996)

Composed of poems, prose segments, and visual pieces, this remarkable first book is both formal and colloquial, fluid and hard-edge, with the diction riffing between Biblical and Dylanesque. A mock-epic of the everyday as it might be discovered through juxtapositions of public and private information.

"Lisa Jarnot's Some Other Kind of Mission suggests that Language Poetry may be mutating, back to the modernism of Stein and Joyce, having been permanently inflected (or deflected) by a late twentieth-century sharpness and exasperation.... These are haunting, perplexing narratives of the inenarrable."

–John Ashbery