Some Other Kind of Mission

A mock-epic of the everyday as it might be discovered through juxtapositions of public and private information. Composed of poems, prose segments, and visual pieces, this remarkable first book is both formal and colloquial, fluid and hard-edge, with the diction riffing between Biblical and Dylanesque.

Lisa Jarnot was born in 1967. She has published several chapbooks and currently lives in New York City.

"Lisa Jarnot's Some Other Kind of Mission suggests that Language Poetry may be mutating, back to the modernism of Stein and Joyce, having been permanently inflected (or deflected) by a late twetieth-century sharpness and exasperation.... These are haunting, perplexing narratives of the inenarrable."
– John Ashbery, "International Books of the Year," Times Literary Supplement

"...a progressive verse script driven by compelling and compulsive projections. Jarnot's poems incorporate and are incorporated in collages that build graphic meta-logics to dislocate the myth of history. Helen of Troy encounters lucky Pierre; 20th century warplanes buzz through The Iliad.

This impressive newcomer's sudden jumps and quirky mappings may leave some heads spinning. Her visual poems, in particular are resonant and haunting, requiring and rewarding second and third looks."
– Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle

"Some Other Kind of Mission is not a misnomer...It is a bit like entering Utah's Canyonlands: the landscape is at first bleak, threatening, otherworldly. But as time is spent ... the richness of the land begins to inundate the senses... Like all difficult terrain, it invites its deal of active participation, good binoculars and a four-wheel drive."
– John Olson, Sulfur

"Her best effects arrive as you zoom headlong right through her high-energy tangle of dissociation ... in a particle accelerator where connective sense is bombarded by shards of broken grammar... dream-of-consciousness poems that might be thought of as super-8 movies taken of thoughts just moments before articulation."
– Albert Mobilio, Village Voice

"a genre-bender of a book"
– Joseph Torra, Boston Book Review