The Happiness Experiment

Lisa Fishman

“These lyrics carry the reader into a realm of immense, immediate, and surreal activity. The Happiness Experiment is a dream-version of what Whitman might have called a ‘song of occupations.” Within Lisa Fishman’s moving work of observation and recollection, the world of ordinary things seems itself to think, to mind itself; things gather, watch, prepare, betray, forget, explore, give names or keep silent. Throughout, the poet’s mercurial intelligence is alert to the play of echo and the surprises of memory, in which the simplest verbs reveal their capacity to haunt. Her book’s experiment is always linked to experience, its happiness to hap or chance.”—Kenneth Gross, author of Shakespeare’s Noise

“Lisa Fishman’s third book is strange and compelling, a kind of pastoral poetry without place. Lightly but passionately undoing (the unmade, undreaming) as much as doing, Fishman’s poems evoke figures of betweenness, floating ‘between the reader and the book.’” —Nicholas Royle, author of After Derrida and The Uncanny