Additional information
by Lisa C. Krueger (Author)
The poems in Lisa C. Krueger's Talisman interrogate the everyday expression of complex human
emotions. In psychological portraits stunning in their precision, Krueger
brings her observational powers to bear on the domestic and its
darknesses--childbirth, play, sex, and family picnics, as well as abuse,
disability, adultery, and mental illness. We see how intimacy is laced with
uncertainty, how the bonds between us can be a form of bondage. Life's long arc
is considered, from the early developmental stages of attachment and
individuation to the existential dramas of purpose and meaning in middle and
old age. What emerges is a study in the mystery of survival, in how we move beyond
the broken places in ourselves. These poems magnify small, everyday redemptions
as signs--talismans--of human potential, and ask us to think about our choices,
to use language as a force to press against truth.
