One Big Time

Author: Lisa Fishman

Publisher: Wave Books (2025)

Lisa Fishman’s One Big Time is a one-woman quest narrative in a kayak, written during the author’s “journey-in-place” in Northeastern Ontario over a period of fourteen days in quarantine.

Here is Fishman at her most exacting and exploratory, in poems that hew with lyric precision to the immediate physical and geologic environment. At the same time, language is an alert, mobile life-form in active investigation of what one thinks one understands, and of where one thinks one is. While the narrator searches daily for a passageway from one body of water into another, words live in other words (“the hemlock / is a he / today”), and acrostics are illuminations: s-w-i-m is “sleek widening instant’s magnet.” Surprised by joy, these biocentric poems offer a way of being in the world with wonder and rigor—attentive enough to be lost, unknowing enough to be changed.