Testify

Other reviewers have mentioned Lease's political/personal slant, so let me focus on the strongest part of Testify, which is Magic, the book's last section. A reader may not - should not? - infer precise meanings from the swirl of words that is Magic, but the reader who lets go and lets the section's tone & feel become the America that has evolved around him or her will get it. And will also, I hope, get his or her part in all of it. It's a beautifully frightening experience when you do - or, better to say, as you do.While I enjoyed the whole of Tesify, it is Magic that truly elevates the work.

Incantations meant to help us to know ourselves (at our largest and most complex) the poems collected in Joseph Lease's brilliant new book are generous, transformative, and immensely necessary. Whitman and Emerson are the models here: admired, cited, critiqued and surpassed in a collection that manages to be at once vividly accountable and...hopeful--as if some real and really lovely sense of what it mean to be "American" might yet survive our greed and thoughtlessness. In song-like poems that seem to break across, at times, a sobbing breath, Lease proves the value of emotion by doing the work of feeling, writing words that let expression work in us. Cathartic, seductive, and fierce, Testify stays true to the disaster, as fragments flow past in a dense montage of description and confession strong enough to keep moving us toward an embodied wisdom, and a better place.

With stunning lyricism, Lease explores the place where the political and the personal are indistinguishable. The passions and struggles of the spirit are echoed in the newspapers and in the streets, but where a lesser talent might succumb to anger or cynicism, Lease gives us many different layers of voices, rhythms and visions that provide depth and vitality. If it's the end of the American experiment, or its final karmic comedown, it's not without humor or love or passion or Spirit. Lease's command of language and his poetic voice(s) is masterful.

These poems are innovative and fascinating. Lease uses language, new, found and recombined, in ways that illuminate the habits of contemporary life and thought while also offering moments that break through the habitual into beauty, human connection, political insight.