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Books
The Largest Possible Life
by Alison Luterman
(Cleveland Press, 2001)
Winner, 2000 CSU Poetry Center Prize
"The best poems from Alison Luterman's first poetry collection, The Largest Possible
Life, have the feel of having been artfully lifted from precise moments of intimacy and
betrayal, and they are imbued with the beautiful impossibility of hope in a world that
seems in mourning for its own lost chances. Yet what balances theis tightrope walk on
the edge of hip nihilism, or clever confessionalism, is a fine and finely tuned artistic
irony. Irony in the old way meant not only a strangely truthful diction turned somehow
askew, but an irony of form as well: a music of line and an urgently human way of
peaking seamlessly woven together. Even more, this is a book of delight and surprise,
and of delicately comic turns of phrase. Out of the corner of her eye, Alison Luterman is
a keen watcher of the tangled business of our lives, and in her heart, she is a
storyteller whose power resides, as in all good storytellers' hearts, in her faith in the
listener."
-- Bruce Weigl
Read these poems from The Largest Possible Life
"Everything at its Core is Pure"
"Choosing It"
"The Largest Possible Life"
Read new poems from See How We Almost Fly
(publication in 2005)