Late Empire, Lisa Olstein (Copper Canyon Press, 2018)

by Maureen Alsop

The title of Lisa Olstein’s latest collection, Late Empire, conceptually alludes to the Roman Empire’s historic endpoint; between the political reality of American demise and scientific aspiration, Olstein’s poetry projects a beam of light. Her lyrics flip the switch between reality and imaginable theory and expose societal under-patterns. By pinning together pensive propositions and personal observations, she establishes anticipatory discourse beyond convention. She states “Language in danger utters words that are dangerous... ” but even when words strip the sheets, bear blood, uncover hypocrisy, Olstein suggests an inevitability. She writes “Irrelevant, says the sea, into which everything we throw away ends up words.” Olstein emphasizes the menacing disconnect of communication versus action. Olstein’s poems seek truth from erratum.

The first section of the book establishes the theme of the collection, asking:

“what if by character or foolishness
or by fate sometimes good people are
inexorably drawn to their own demise?”

Olstein implies a response to this proposal. She effortlessly and tenaciously taps upon the door, walls, windows, pillar, platform, architrave of the dreamed foundation in an unrelenting escalation to answer this question. 


Olstein applies anaphora as a mesmeric tool, a scaffolding, to deepen the potency of diction. In the second of five sections of the book, every other poem begins: “Then I was a safe house…”. Yet each of these entry points, as beacon, launch the reader into an unsettling disclosure: “America, 22% of your highway drivers are high,” “Threats get our attention,” …

“There’s a girl flickering across the news
some murder brings presents to.
…we modelled trajectory on your
shooting flight, then we positioned
our guns to put you in our sights.”


Cultural violence is intrinsically woven into the poems’ narratives. Violence permeates ether. This violence is a looming threat to the unthreatened. It is an incendiary, impersonal threat which lurks within our daily scene.

Section three utilizes the word “Whistle” in a series of prose poems. “Whistle, are the material of essential matters we cannot see,” here the whistle blower, a “Whistle, sometimes crying…”. The Whistle is the wind between word’s exorcisms. “Whistle, a rash of new billboards around the city warn us…” “waves of data from all directions…” “Whistle, we ask you what you believe, but this is a dirty trick because really all of us has to believe in is what we’ve been taught…” We, a collective dispersion, a spat of air and affliction caught between “machines calling out coded bridges between the heart of some need.” Unconsciously we are simultaneously implicated and victimized by this aggression.


With Bauchlard’s Poetics of Space as a touchstone, section four of the collection accentuates science and philosophy: physics, geography, and the boundlessness of human imagination, all of which perpetuate advancement. Yet again, Olstein accentuates a worrying anecdote that without speaking up such intelligence may be lost:

“What good things are
Being kept in reserve…

…Objection
overridden, erudite minds lay in provisions
an anthology of mechanized debates”


As Olstein enters the empire, her unsettling entry point on language refreshes a shadow’s profile in a personal and broad commentary on what should not, but may be, disused, or worse, secreted and locked away:


“ what soft words
cut the story short? Nothing more to
confess, every secret has its little casket
In other words, a secret is a grave…”


Olstein’s handsome crafting of the personal expresses the permeability of cultural possibility. Perhaps there is no danger to the diminishment of disaster. Perhaps disaster is already too deeply upon us.


In the last section of the book the poems depict images of an inherent desensitisation in the American consciousness. The poems explore a nightmarish detritus, unearthing a subversive vision which hints at an apocalyptic integration of violence within America. Her imagery unfolds a dark annihilation.

“You wake with a needle in your arm, a spider in the soup of blood, a doctor rebandaging your ripped-wrists. “

Yet the author, through the prospect of dialog, offers hope in the final sentence of the collection. Avoidance to face the essential:

“Last night on the street
beneath a bullet like this one I drank in a life
story because I was asked. This, too, was a version
of the conversation we keep needing
not to let ourselves have. “

Late Empire’s astonishing poems intone in ominous beauty. Though guarded, Olstein is not nihilistic in her outlook as she offers the possibility of defeating pervasive political structures. Late Empire is prescient in this political era wherein America is experiencing progressive peril to democracy. Lisa Olstein’s Late Empire is a five-star collection from an extraordinary poet.