Distinguished Office of Echoes

From renderings of sea creatures to maps of ancient battles, Distinguished Office of Echoescollages its way through history, seeking new unknowns.

A hybrid collection of three collage-, cutout-, and erasure-based poems, Lisa Olstein's Distinguished Office of Echoesleans into the visual and the linguistic, the revelatory and the strange. Each sequence uses an antique reference book as its source text: an 1865 study of marine invertebrates explores the moment of death, of sudden loss; a 1905 primer on ancient Greek history investigates human versus geologic time, time of war versus time of river and sea, an 1865 medical textbook journeys into the eerie dislocations of illness to reclaim the voice of the examined. Olstein brings a combination of reverence and irreverence, wit and tenderness to these archival texts-their taxonomies and lexicons, rhetorical and printing styles, assumptions and elisions-to cast a feminist gaze on outdated histories and methodologies. New intimacies arise. Pages pulse with the magnetic pull of material fascination as Olstein studies, cuts, collages, erases, layers, transforms image, point of view, and the poetic line. As each poem reconsiders what it means to examine and to be examined, the universe undoes itself, our knowing unravels.

"An accomplished poet, she often uses language beautifully and inventively.” —The New York Times

“Is she just smarter about syntax, more articulate about human drama, more imaginative about eeriness, more insightful about sadness, more capable of turning a novel phrase, more engaging a storyteller than nearly all the rest of her peers? Well, yes.” —The Huffington Post

“Olstein’s profound and attentive poems reveal her formal dexterity and knack for spotting modernity’s absurdities —Publishers Weekly

“Tenderness, then, is a form of resistance. It allows Olstein to create intimacy on the page not only among those who inhabit these poems, but also in those of us reading them . . . With this book, Olstein has declared herself a poet worth watching” —Eric Smith, The Rumpus

“Olstein places the mystical next to the mundane, bees next to bricklayers, purple finches next to garage doors, reason next to faith, chance near fate. She explodes theories of cause and effect and expands our notions of logic, symbolism, and the territory between dreams and waking experience.” —The Growler Poetry Review 

“Sharp, approachable work for most readers.” —The Library Journal

"Brilliant and provocative . . . Olstein realizes that the rules of language must be questioned, interrogated, and revised from within." —The Literary Review

Lisa Olstein is the author of six poetry collections and two books of nonfiction. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Residency Fellowship, Hayden Carruth Award, and Writers League of Texas Award. She is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.

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