Lisa A. Flowers

Lisa's Substack • 23rd October 2026

Funhouse Mirror as Lite-Up Makeup Mirror: Archive Review of Kate Durbin’s “E! Entertainment,” With Interview

If Hedda Hopper had been reincarnated into a bag lady forced to stuff her own newspaper columns into her clothes for warmth, the wyrd outer hummings of her cycle toward rebirth might well have been echoed in Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment.

Lisa's Substack • 23rd October 2026

Review From the Archives: Blindfolds & Event Horizons in Dana Curtis’s “Camera Stellata”

One of the most dreamily sinister images in Dana Curtis’ Camera Stellata appears in the poem The Final Amnesia, which features an abandoned Eden drifting in space with hanged gardeners who “have decided to die/to give the roses/wings/the mint/dominion.”

Lisa's Substack • 8th October 2026

“What if We Pretended That Everybody Else Had Died Violently”: The Heady, Cinematic Fantasy of Invincible Romanticism in Lisa Marie Basile's “Saint Of”

A girl in trouble may be a temporary thing, as Romeo Void sings. But girls are forever being born, and forever becoming young women, and forever becoming a target demographic for yearning. In the annals of fairytales, it’s a yearning for beorht gowns,...

The Collagist • 10th January 2026

A Menstrual-Blood Filled Water Balloon Exploding in Roy Lichtenstein's Face: 'All the Garbage of the World, Unite!'

Translated from the Korean by poet Don Mee Choi, (and perhaps gleaning some of its brilliantly effective childish cadences through loss in translation), Kim Hyesoon's All the Garbage of the World, Unite! comes on like a menstrual-blood filled water...

Tarpaulin Sky Press • 25th December 2025

The Great, Lost, Surrealist Age of Looney Toons: “Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream”

"Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream" is a boisterous ouija wifi hot/coldspot, with many of its entities seeming to hail from the great, lost, surrealist age of Looney Toons. Ideas seem to fly out of pages in particles or wallops, embedding themselves into...

Tarpaulin Sky • 27th April 2017

Abra: An Ingenious Human Centipede Constantly Morphing Toward the “Wit End” of the Stick

The project zooms on like a babe’s bright ball, sailing Toon Town-like past peppermint striped, crèmepuffed, scalloped, edible villages, out of whose windows fantastic characters lean, wave, and sometimes fly.

LUNA LUNA • 15th February 2017

You Just Wouldn't Believe What That Kangaroo Did to This Courtyard: Prizefighting Death in CA Conrad's "A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon"

True to the reverence, often expressed in his work, for nearly everything as sentient life, Conrad kills nothing, and all the pretty chickens and their dam run free and pecking at our ankles through the streets of his poems like a brood of unruly...

LUNA LUNA • 9th December 2016

Interview in Luna Luna Magazine

JH: Congratulations on your first book diatomhero: religious poems. I treasure how this poetry holds every religion responsible for being authentic and explores exactly what kind of turmoil/freedom of movement (of creed, language, time, space) arises...

LUNA LUNA • 7th December 2016

"Off-Halloween" Recommendations: Bruno Dumont's "Twentynine Palms"

Language begins to presents an increasingly sinister (and babelishly primitive) barrier as the film moves ever deeper into the heart of oppressively Biblical, and symbolic, isolation.

LUNA LUNA • 7th November 2016

"Off-Halloween" Recommendations: David Lynch's "Inland Empire"

'Inland Empire' could be said to be about reincarnation, karma, or a Tibetan Book Of The Deadesque trip to heaven via various stages of atonement (like a series of seemingly impossible tasks given to a Grimm's fairy tale maiden).

Connotation Press • 2nd March 2016

"Mad Like Young Girls Are Mad":"The Ravenous Audience"

[A] a kind of multimedia coming of age project set in rooms as lurid and Technicolor as a Ray Caesar girl's boudoir...hairpieces, sequins, and various garish cosmetics scattered on a dressing table next to Anatomy Of Hell's bloodied tampon in a water...

LUNA LUNA • 2nd January 2016

Corsets and Formal Wear Defaulting to Corsets and Burial Wear: Simone Muench's 'Orange Crush'

Take the landscape evoked in Randy Newman’s In Germany Before the War, the strangling scene in Strangers on a Train, a seaside scattering of rinds and corsages, and corsets and formal wear defaulting to corsets and burial wear and you come close to...

Tarpaulin Sky Press • 1st September 2015

The Impossibility of Evidence in the Present Tense: 'E! Entertainment'

“We are modeled from trash”, says protagonist Ruth in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.  This quote could have worked brilliantly as an epigraph for Kate Durbin’s E Entertainment, which has been called “the first book in history to be blurbed by both...

LUNA LUNA • 29th June 2015

Psychic Privates And a Whole Lotta Crystal Balling: an Interview With Kim Vodicka

LF: In this book, it seems like you've managed to pimp fear out into the universe to do your bidding, and managed to use its noxious energy source to "green-power" (so to speak) a project that's gorgeous and liberating.

ENTROPY • 2nd April 2015

Blondness Like Mortality Splashed into Light: Henry Darger and Jim Elledge’s 'H'

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life,” wrote George Eliot. So it is with Jim...

HTML Giant • 2nd March 2015

Mistletoe and Misanthropy Out On a Limb: 'Rumble Seat'

“If I die during a crossword puzzle, I am allowed to finish.” So nearly concludes Rumble Seat, a Cretan-cum-Cracker Jack maze of delights presided over by the shade (elms over David Lynchian suburbia, not ghost) of Frank O’Hara.

13th October 2013

Deathbed Vigils as Hallucinogenic Radiance: Bobbi Lurie's 'Grief Suite'

In "Strange Light", the dying subject has either found a validation for meaninglessness he has been seeking his whole life—and in doing so become a kind of holy monster of self-absorption—and/or attained a kind of macabre, transcendental "peace that...

11th March 2013

Safe Inside Our Own Disappearances: 'Digressions on God'

In a world where atheist intellectualism is the new black (and the new presumption), it's a welcome throwback to the sensibility of visionaries like John Donne, Anne Bradstreet, and the sublimely agnostic John Berryman of 'Eleven Addresses to the...

Tarpaulin Sky Press • 12th December 2012

Through a Crass Darkly: The Seductive Dismemberings of 'Aesthesia Balderdash'

In Vodicka’s vision, Miss Anorexis Malibu, in her eternal plastic archetype, is “an infinitely sustainable, primordial hoe bag,” Zsa Zsa Gabor is an “adulteress skull, overwintering in the Hamptons”, and “barflowers drunk on prisms full of Rhine...

TheThe Poetry • 1st December 2012

Remembering Mary: An Interview With Mary Jarrell, Widow of Poet and Critic Randall Jarrell

“I’m tired, yes. But happy,” she replies. “It links me to once again quote Benjamin Franklin’s observation to the signers of the Constitution, ‘I’m so old I am intruding in posterity’.” She smiles, and her remarkable eyes are as bright as a child’s in the sun.