Books
- I WENT LOOKING FOR YOU
- MORPHOLOGY
- POETRY FROM SOJOURNER
- DREAMING IN COLOR
I WENT LOOKING FOR YOU
Pure and graceful and deep: it takes much time to come to those three. Here they are. Fragile and objective, the view of the world from here. It is how a person sees when looking. Very clear.
...a very simpatico view of the world, so that I sink into this work as if she were an old friend, catching up on shared points of interest on the best phone connection ever established.
...the turn itself is integral to Lepson's poetics — turn of the earth, or the slow, eternal return of time and space. Maybe both, but she is committed to the detail of the very present moment, in all its luminosity....she goes “looking for you” in a poem addressed to the departed spirit of Sexton — there are also remarkable elegies, if that's not too strong a word, for Levertov and Robert Creeley....The humble inward turning to the consonants, between “relax” and “angry,” denotes a typical jump in Lepson's thought, where sound is always in the service of sense....
— Kevin Killian
These wonderful poems by Ruth Lepson are deeply felt meditations on family, friends, lovers, the people she “can't leave behind.” The book begins with poems about places, mainly Swampscott, Massachusetts, a town on the ocean that she loves to visit. “Time Line” then makes something like a drawing out of the past, and “Function Theory” suggests a sort of mathematical model of a girl's thought processes. These are followed by several delicate poems about Ruth's aging parents and others about deceased friends. This private world is then enlarged, often with humor, to include strangers both overheard and seen, as well as works of art. These are the “things I can name” out of which she makes her life. The last half of the book is a tender and perceptive series of poems about love that persists across disconnections, loss, and time. Idyllic and dissonant scenes are recalled. Dreams prolong the dissolved relationships. And finally, the dreamer wakes up “surrounded with life.”
Much like the places Ruth Lepson affectionately describes in her poems, her themes are timeless. Her words are heart-felt and artfully laid out. The poems are lively in their melancholy and accepting in the face of mortality. Passionately human, I Went Looking for You is a collection that feels at once familiar and astounding.
– Susie Y. Kim, The Harvard Crimson (Read the full review
...Ruth writes wistful poems of intimate atmosphere observed with notational spontaneity and subtle metaphor.
– Scott Ruescher, The Cambridge Chronicle (Read the full review)
Overheard conversations, random thoughts, and the delicate nature of relationships find a place in Lepson's "I Went Looking for You."
–Jan Gardner, boston.com, Shelf Life, The Boston Sunday Globe
Morphology by Walter Crump and Ruth Lepson
Reading the poems, it feels as if Lepson is talking to each of us individually, engaged in an intimate and very comfortable conversation . . . about snow turning musical, floating marzipan and mascarpone, a sentence turning into molding on a building....The writing is simple, calm and direct, and reminds me of the tone of Buddhist teachings, with a sense of humor....Buddha, concepts, facts and so forth drift in synaethasea. Dreams are seen as the flip side, or another side, of awareness....Some of Crump's photos include images superimposed on other images, and he extends this idea in Morphology by adding another layer to his photos, in the form of Lepson's words....In this book, his diaphonous pictures align with Lepson's dream text and Strong's often whimsical typography to create a sensitive, well thought out whole....My advice is to go online to look at the photos but for a greater appreciation of Morphology get the book. Holding a book is a more restful experience than looking at a computer screen, and restfulness seems right for this work from Lepson, Crump and Strong.
– John Mercuri Dooley, Jacket Magazine (Read the full review)
Their collaboration keeps tuning itself as if percusively debunking an instructional demo before the premiere of an impossibly extravagant sonatina....Ruth's text carries descriptors for surreal accompaniment aspiring to an arrangement of countless propositional forks, tuning forks perhaps....Thanks to Christina Strong's document design the text plays companion to the photos in shapes of sometimes shadowed, inflationary, floating or boxed-in fonts that all together reinforce the idea of competing notes, rather than notions, tuning up, drifting, “flying through the word -- the wind.” Walter's landscapes and portraits, some taken through a pin-hole lens that produces an equal focus across varying distances, some double-exposed, feel like propositions, as well. The photos that also incorporate Ruth's text multiply the drift as she's “standing in the middle of a paragraph.”
– Jack Kimball, Pantaloons (Read the full review
The era of “colored hearing” is now awash with Morphology's dreamlaps. Poems sense aside photos while photos press lines to logos — a ”double joy” that explodes the “fortune cookie” approach to dream talk. “Awake” is now “Aquake”, and we are more sensible souls for the “light tablets” this collaboration tones us.
In the first image of Ruth Lepson and Walter Crump's Morphology, the eye follows train tracks into a distant background of earth-meets-sky, the sky a near circle of light, presenting at the same time an enclosure and an eternity. The first text suggests a linkage of thinking and seeing: if I think it, it appears. Magic. The magic here concerns the relationship of verbal to visual, a relationship always lively, never predictable. The text is no less visual than the photographs, and at times even the letters take one's attention (and one's breath away); in the section in which it is stated that all men are pencils, two times the letter “y” (why? Y chromosome? a leaning “v” standing on one leaning leg? all these & more) is separated from its word and enlarged to become a visual presence, an occupier of space on the page, in the eye, in the mind. One complete page of the book states that “my brain is a tablet of light.” In this book, this fine work of art, this perfect interplay of writing and photography (both graphic in their own ways), “the sentence is turning into a person.” If you read and see carefully, you will be that person. If you're looking for something, you will find it here. If you're not looking for something, you will find it here, where “someone else is standing at the other end of that sentence,” a thought you hear while looking at a dimmed and timeless photograph of water meeting earth meeting clouds, and you gain a sense that the sentence is ongoing and connects everything that you are with everything you have seen, and that it will go on for miles and miles and miles without ending. This book is magic. I want to read it a thousand times.
In Lepson and Crump's collaborative improvisations, language becomes a playful substance in which we find ourselves furtively embodied, “camped out near a shoulder” or “standing in the middle of a paragraph.” Acts of renaming and comparing create a flux of metamorphoses both ominously curious and sweetly surprised. These exuberant, synesthetic leaps between the visual and the verbal bypass unlikeness, pursuing instead a kind of social dreaming in which everyone is included.
“Using pin-hole cameras he constructs himself, Crump, a nationally recognized photographer, goes beyond the picture's limits to turn city architecture as fluid as a rollercoaster. But in spite of the extreme, almost hallucinatory distortions he works with, Crump retains the dignified, monumental presence in each one. Using toners and bleaches, he crafts a subtle, glowing complexity of color; bronzes, ivories, ochres, at once somber and light-filled.”
– from The Cape Cod Voice, Vol. 2 No. 11
“I am attracted to alternative ways in which cameras see the world.”
Poetry from Sojourner:
A Feminist Anthology
Edited by Ruth Lepson with Lynne Yamaguchi
Introduction by Mary Loeffelholz
Collection of poems from 25 years of Sojourner.
For much of its history Sojourner was the most widely circulated feminist literary journal in America, and more than 1200 poems have appeared in its pages since it began publication in 1975. Nearly 150 of those poems are collected in this volume, where together they form a powerful testament to the vibrancy, wit, and diversity of feminist poetry. In addition to works by such well-known poets as Molly Peacock, Nikki Giovanni, Betsy Sholl, and Adrienne Rich, this collection includes poems by women from a host of different backgrounds, including many whose work appeared in print for the first time in Sojourner. Some of these poems explode with energy, others speak with a haiku-like softness; some discuss love, lust, and sexuality, while others deal with loss, divorce, and revenge. The voices collected here are old and young, rural and urban, straight and gay, from mothers and daughters to wives, lovers, and countless others, all contributing to this anthology's wide-ranging conversation about feminism and feminist poetics.
“This collection of poems reminds me of found letters that describe more truthfully than any official history the mind-set of a generation. Feminism — when it still related to the natural world (beauty) and was committed to the pursuit of happiness in relationship — feminism as narrative — from page one onward IS this anthology.”
Dreaming in Color
Chosen by Library Journal as one of the best small press books of the year
“There are often unabashedly beautiful tones of words, rhyme, the works.”
“Perception, honesty, delight — it's all there. She combines an ear for pure language with sharp intelligence about people."
“... a tone, created by her eye, her use of an angle of vision in which 'things tilt,' direction changes, and she as much as we her readers are led on... this sense of ideas and images are projecting planes... Lepson is very smart... She's at her finest, hardest in her love poems... an interesting sensibility at work here.”
“In Dreaming in Color by Ruth Lepson, poems are precisely dream colored, softly musical in their penetration of experience, sharply — and with some critical humor — self-aware.”
“Intimate scenes. Nuances. Then, in the best poems, a line suddenly turns and veers off. Surprised, we find ourselves in stranger territory than we knew.”
“Ruth Lepson is more of an action poet than a realist. She's far more interested in the act of writing — 'beating down the barricades of habit and routine' — than she is in making statements or resolving her dreamlike flashes into a whole.” ... “Her freewheeling technique...its cumulative effect transports us to a unique state of mind somewhere between the desire to write poetry and the end product itself — a game, one recalls, that also occupied T. S. Eliot in his later poems.”
Cover by Lucy Clark