Guide to the Exhibit

With a naturalist’s insatiable curiosity and an intimacy that comes from prolonged and meticulous observation, Lisa Allen Ortiz guides us through a world that seems exotic, but which we ultimately recognize as the only world: our own. These marvelous poems (for they are full of marvels) examine and catalog the flora and fauna of our planet, its rocks and skies and soil and waters, both from outside, looking at them, but also from inside, looking as them. I mean that literally. In language that is spare, precise, and at times wonderfully, subtly strange, Ortiz works in the overlap between self and world, showing us that time does not honor human consciousness, nor even recognize it. Yet the world is all we have, and what we are is part of it. We are not its masters, and the attempt to hold onto things by saving, describing, and labeling them, is doomed. We’ll lose what we love. This hard-won understanding is the tough heart of this piercing, memorable book, which, like any memorial, is simultaneously a celebration of life and an elegy.

—Chase Twichell

As Lisa Allen Ortiz moves through a natural history museum, she discovers a museum of her life, of all our lives, the remnants and reflections of what we have saved and what we cannot save. Her beautifully crafted language connects us to the elemental, as in this description of a hummingbird: “carbon tenderness, / caught shimmer.” Through the careful, precise observation of individuality, she reveals universal truths. In “Microfossil Exhibit,” she compares herself to tiny creatures—“such small wanting”—and finds our commonality in what is, perhaps, our deepest need, “to be handled, seen, and noted.” Ortiz’s devotion to exploring exactly this need makes Guide to the Exhibit so rich.

—Ellen Bass

This book has many things I most hope for in poetry. The speaker is madly in love with the world and its names, its things. There is courage everywhere and acute attentiveness. These poems come to you—urgent, rushing, and controlled, from a wide-open heart. A splendid debut.

—Thomas Lux

Check out this beautiful review constructed as a collection of field notes written by Amie Whittemore and published in The Bind on November 2, 2017. Here’s a taste:

• If to exhibit is to publically display, it’s important to note that Ortiz exhibits private geographies, of the heart and mind—love, its playfulness; how we are all microbiomes; what it feels like to lose a parent, to contemplate paradise while drinking Mai Tais; she attends to quiet liminalities, slippery in-betweens.
   
• Yet, she is also looking (always, with the looking!) at what is public, though we don’t often associate that adjective with glaciers and bowerbirds, with beakfish and turtles; in short, the world, the self—we’re all exhibitionists. Who’s looking at whom (cue Rilke winking behind the curtain of every poem)?
   
• What’s (mostly) absent from these poems: social media, pop culture, political references.

   

• What shadows the edges: war, climate change, the many ways we wound each other.
   
• What is often at center: curiosity, splendor, grief, the art of lov(s)ing. Is it a privilege to not write directly about war? About identity? About traumas of the body and mind? Surely. Do we need more collections by a diversity of writers about war, identity, and trauma? Of course.

The following review by Lee Rossi appeared in issue 79 of Pedestal Magazine:

Lisa Allen Ortiz’s Guide to the Exhibit, Reviewed by Lee Rossi

Lisa Allen Ortiz was born and raised in Mendocino County, California. Her poems and translations have appeared in Narrative, Best New Poets 2013, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Literary Review. She is the author of two chapbooks: Turns Out and Self Portrait as a Clock. She lives in Santa Cruz where she teaches creative writing to middle school students.

You can read more about Lisa at her website.

Listen to a selection from Guide to the Exhibit read by Lisa Allen Ortiz at Perugia Press’s 20th anniversary celebration at Smith College, Northampton, MA, on November 12, 2016:

Poem, “Patois”: