The Happiness Experiment

Lisa Fishman

Reviews of the book

“Nothing in Fishman’s laconic earlier books would have predicted the dreamy, impressive exuberance in this, her third: the poet depicts her rural surroundings, their precedents in classical pastoral, and her own, generously drift-prone imagination in these lyrical sequences, exploring attachments geographic, georgic, erotic and maternal. ‘Darken the roses dried on the lamppost,’ one of a few poems called ‘Calendar,’ instructs; ‘thud thud in the weather / all trembling kissed my mouth.’ Fishman (Dear, Read) repeatedly invokes the Romantic radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley as she seeks ideals, new beginnings, and pure sentiments in a sometimes frustrating Midwest: ‘One winter the road stuck us all in our houses / turning to horses or daughters or fish.’ Titles such as ‘Eighth Month’ and ‘Ninth Month’ combine an interest in pregnancy and motherhood with attention to the agricultural year, at once inevitable and eccentric: ‘the woman tore a flower like a cabbage / Often she was full of beets.’ Breathless, almost punctuation-free lines recall the W.S. Merwin of the 1970s, whose fans ought to love Fishman’s work—yet Fishman is hopeful where Merwin was dark, delighted amid disorder. Originality and sincerity make up, in these bravura bursts of song, for what can look like disorganization, and even her many abandonments of syntax and sentence structure serve her emotions, describing her search for a better, unconventional way to live: ‘Don’t be silly / like a pillow full of atoms, where to lay your / head with horses / in the happiness.’” —Publisher’s Weekly

“Modernity asks: can the clock be trusted? Einstein’s clocks—addled by action—and Dali’s clocks—limp by nature—declare they can’t. We have to find another way to count. Just so: The Happiness Experiment moves in fits and starts, by horoscopes and harvests, the Gregorian calendar and constellations as well as subtler devices down within the poems, navigating by ‘halfway point[s] / we heard of in the dark.’ Even alphabets—there are two smart abecedarians—are an attempt to make measurements. Lisa Fishman’s fine new lyrics move smooth-cadenced through irregular samplings and rulers of time, ‘Midsummer’ to the ‘Ninth Month,’ ‘October' to ‘Infinity.’ But in any particular instant, fluctuating time seems to be suspended, and her poems the result of illuminating what hangs in that moment. . . . The poems are in fragments, often—but never shards. They’re un-screwed, un-locked, released like the broom’s bristles that ‘unthread.’ (‘Undreamed,’ she writes—an aptitude for beautiful undoings.) It seems crucial that ‘Everything is alchemy, Shelley said / if it is secret,’ and in The Happiness Experiment so much is revealed to be a secret. Held to a lamp, a sun or moon, it’s the shape those secrets make, in an instant of refraction and shadow, that forms the poem.” —from the review in Cranky by Alex Walton

“This is a collection of intense lyrics that seem intent on physicality, action, and THE SOUL, poems that work to distance our consumed/consumer selves from what this world has become and return them to a state of wonder in which true perception/connection can take place. . . . Fishman’s work is distinctive and important not only because of her technique but because of what she is saying. It seems the purpose here isn’t so much to present answers, or to wring hands (as Wordsworth might have done) over our current mess, but to encourage readers, those who are baffled or intrigued or somewhere else entirely, to think intuitively and emotionally. Through poems that consistently utilize physical and natural objects as the center for slippery and hazily defined abstractions, Fishman’s experiment provides some interesting and happy results.” —from the review by Nate Pritts in Rain Taxi