With her trademark language-baroque yet colloquial, immediately recognizable but impossible to duplicate-Lisa Russ Spaar has written her most sumptuous, alluring, and steamy poems to date, each one bursting with an appetite for the sensuous and the lingual. "Is syntax erotic?" she asks in Vanitas, Rough. "If so, please. Please read. Here."

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Orexia (Persea, 2017), and a collections of essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry. She is the editor of Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson; Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems; and All that Mighty Heart: London Poems. She is a poetry columnist for Los Angeles Review of Books and Professor of English at the University of Virginia.