Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition

Author: Lisa Fishman

Publisher: Wave Books (2020)

Spanning 16 years of notebooks, teaching notes, and improvisations, Lisa Fishman's Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition upends time itself in lyric, prose, and visual forms. Sharing Paul Klee's intuition that "the eye travels along the path cut out for it in the work," this deeply multifaceted book moves between observational directness and maddened speech, places and persons, humor and alarm. Tempted by Laura Riding's renunciation of poetry yet rich with life-forms of all kinds (vegetable, animal, processual), it is a work of immediate presence and continuous change, enacting an ever-renewing ecology of connection in peril.