The Way Out

by Lisa Sewell

“In her collection, *The Way Out*, Lisa Sewell grapples with metaphorical and literal hungers with a magnetic density. Frank Bidart writes that Sewell offers a ‘terrible purity’ fashioned out of the ‘desolation’ her poems work through, poems with ‘great weight and power.’ I concur. We encounter an intelligent, elegant, darkly honest poet who feeds our eyes, ears, mind, and heart.” —*Colorado Review* “Sewell searches for what lies beneath her own humanity: her capacity for violence and love; what one’s ‘nature’ determines about oneself; and how the mind and spirit can exist willingly with the ‘knowledge that we are hopelessly enclosed / by the measure of our skins.’ . . . Sewell’s debut collection *The Way Out*, is a very fine read.” —*Quarterly West* “There’s a terrible purity to the desolation from which many of these poems emerge. They emerge with unlacquered finality. Their gaze is pitiless. Cumulatively, Sewell’s poems possess great weight and power. In this ferocious book you will