"Lisa Jarnot's book of joy raises joy in return. It is a poetry of lyric finesse and emotional daring, a rollicking vision of violet skies and walk-along streets, with the walker shamelessly in wonder but
yo!
cagily of the streets."
Aaron Shurin "Joie de Vivre rings out with troubled beauty, ancient lastingness, and a wild lyricism that shares as much with Johnny Cash ... Read moreas with Gertrude Stein and loves Homer even when it thinks like Abbie Hoffman. This work sets the house of American poetry on fire."
Elizabeth Willis "These always strongly oral poems that cry out from the page in sequences that veer between pure whimsy within a spoken word sensibility approach and often surpass art song territory. The crescendo resolution is felt in the extended 'Amedillin Cooperative Nosegay' where the expanse of her well-earned landscape becomes a realized space in proper necessity for the scope of her delightfully unpredictable poetic."
David Henderson "Jarnot's poetry continues to resonate because
after the experimentation and language play
her poems still burst both with feeling and beauty... Jarnot finds a way to capture a moment of emotional intensity with and in language, while simultaneously letting that moment retain the mystery and the wonder which it produces."
Joshua Ware, Vouched Books "There's a pop-Romanticism, American to the core, behind the majority of Jarnot's most easily enjoyable verse ... These poems orbit day to day reality on paths based off non sequiturs and randy loop de loops."
Patrick-James-Dunagan, The Rumpus "Lisa Jarnot possesses both the raw lyrical pathos of Johnny Cash and the complex stylistics of Gertrude Stein ..."
Mike Sonksen, KCET Show Less