“Lise Goett’s Leprosarium is luminous, symphonic, and suffused with mystical awareness—a primer on learning to live with despair and silence, to be tempered by suffering and also calm, inflamed by desire and yet arrive at acceptance of silence itself as God. In her intricately constructed asylum for incurables we come upon a host of artists and saints, lovers, a warden of extinguished hopes, / keeper of the stillnesses, avatar / of what is past. The allusive range is breath-taking, the diction precisely chiseled. It is as if we have taken the hand of a contemporary Virgil on a journey from the ancient world to our own stopping off to look at images mounted in a gallery of hard-won realizations. Certain lines will stay with me forever: The body is a prison with a key. When we enter Leprosarium we enter at once a work of brilliant lyric art and ecstatic vision.” —Carolyn Forché

“With her masterly soundscapes, multi-colored symphonies, and ekphrastic meditations, it’s clear Lise Goett is an impassioned chatelaine of sound (‘Eros Aprilling us into wider spaces’) and visual beauty, but most of all, she revels in the frissons, the firefly sparks that virtuosic language can liberate. With a saint’s or a dervish’s acuity, she insists, of this ‘spinning lazaretto’ of a world: ‘Everything is grist for ascendance.’ Indeed, in her cascading lines, rife with probity and complexity, soaring and suffering appear as close as Damon and Pythias. Drawn to defiance and disavowal as much as to ecstasy and devotion, Goett declares, in the brilliant, betrayed persona of Camille Claudel, the tragic sculptor: ‘I am wild like the nettle and dangerous / behind the gate.’ What a consistently astute, lush, and startling collection!” —Cyrus Cassells

“A clear-eyed diagnosis of our society and a profound care for the present are to be found enlivened in the poems of Leprosarium. With elegance of mind and music, now sinuous as woodwinds, now forceful as an unexpected chord progression, poetic lines here are able to suggest states of glory and splendor before vanishing again into the hard kernel of verbal custody—into ‘glister’ and ‘slurry’— into formal and acoustic fulfillment. Feminine eroticism under the aegis of patriarchy inform several meditations on the art of Leonardo, Fragonard, Rodin, Singer Sargent, Whistler, and Leonor Fini. With self-possession and discernment, Lise Goett has crafted a book of intellectual drive and irrefutable grace in poems that wrestle with humanity’s stewardship or annihilation of all that is wild and passionate at the core of existence. Leprosarium wonders whether we live in quarantine from the ghost-gods of desire—or for the ‘for-the-sake-of’s’ that are poetry’s promising argument.” —Roberto Tejada