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 echoic resonance, 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. Much like the sudden odor of rain or dry leaves rustling, these exquisite poems are not outside the common world. Rather, they are found entirely within it--in the sounds, smells, feel of a life, of each day's sun and its fading, of what we can know of one another. Lisa Fishman writes with an impeccable sense of cadence, of words as sounds too, of physical fact becoming thought and then recurring as poetry. --Robert Creeley Lisa Fishman is a writer who works--confidently, brilliantly--in close-up, often phrase to phrase, building texts that knock you over with their rhythms & insights even though it would be very difficult indeed to paraphrase what she's doing. --Ron Silliman This is a world in the midst of creation, an Ars Poetica of everything. -- Publishers Weekly Much like the sudden odor of rain or dry leaves rustling, these exquisite poems are not outside the common world. Rather, they are found entirely within it—in the sounds, smells, feel of a life, of each day's sun and its fading, of what we can know of one another. Lisa Fishman writes with an impeccable sense of cadence, of words as sounds too, of physical fact becoming thought and then recurring as poetry. —Robert Creeley Lisa Fishman is a writer who works—confidently, brilliantly—in close-up, often phrase to phrase, building texts that knock you over with their rhythms & insights even though it would be very difficult indeed to paraphrase what she's doing. —Ron Silliman This is a world in the midst of creation, an Ars Poetica of everything. — Publishers Weekly Lisa Fishman is the author of 24 Pages and other poems (Wave, 2015), F L O W E R C A R T (Ahsahta Press, 2011), Current (Parlor Press, 2011) and The Happiness Experiment (Ahsahta, 2009). A North American writer (US and Canadian), Fishman is working on dividing her time between Wisconsin, where she currently lives, and somewhere across the border. Writing Small wooden ladders hook onto the truck. The child plays House On Fire for the pleasure of making the siren sound for the pleasure of unhooking ladders & leaning them against the burning house. The cousin-doll, a wooden peg, races up the ladder on her peg body to spray water with her no-hands, no-arms. Also, there is no house just the start of a wood project: a paper shredder we call the house. Often the cousin-doll gets lost and the child both grieves and stores the grief. The wooden peg appears as randomly as disappears. I see that the bark at the base of the hickory has green in it and blue, and I remember trying to write about that.