Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005

Author: Lewis Warsh

Publisher: Granary Books (2008)

Inseparable collects poems written between 1995 and 2005 by the New York poet, editor, and novelist Lewis Warsh. Strongly identified with New York since the 1960s, when he co-founded Angel Hair magazine with Anne Waldman, Warsh makes poems from the city's linguistic fabric, interwoven with a bemused real-time interiority. The 35 poems of this collection are pitted with reminiscences made approachable to the reader by their lack of self-absorption; it is the momentum of the will to persist by means of language—"moving, word by word"—against the incipient flickerings of mortality, that is their real logic. This act of self-propulsion may be subject to doubt ("Can we spend our lives feeding/off simple endurance?"), but it is humbly pursued: Warsh resists the inflated rhetoric such preoccupations usually attract and sticks instead with, in the words of his colleague Clark Coolidge, "confusion, in strict order."