The Flaws in the Story
Chosen by Mary Jo Bang as the winner of the 2023 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, my new book of poetry is out now.
Ask for it at your local bookstore!
(Also available to order on Amazon.)
“…each of these fascinating poems…reveals, much like a chapter in a novel might, a set of characters with moods and conundrums”
Mary Jo Bang
Follow my Substack: “How To Read A Poem: A Love Story”
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Books
Frankie, Alfredo,
Donut Press, 2009
Leaving Eden
Salt Publishing, 2010
All the Ways You Still
Remind Me of the Moon
Paekakariki Press, 2015
Michael Donaghy | Limelight – October ‘03
Liane Strauss writes fresh, compelling, edgy, intelligent poetry... as if she's confidently mapping the secret grammar & physics of the universe... The overall effect is one of opulent elaboration.
Mark Jarman | Hudson Review - Autumn ‘24
Liane Strauss has given us an invaluable book of poetry about reading and finding ourselves in a paradox of being both narrator and narrative of our own lives.
Clive James | clivejames.com
[Strauss] can drive a standard romantic line straight at the wall of cliché and spin the wheel at the last moment... so that the whole idea turns into a memorable night out with a picnic on the canal bank at dawn as the car finishes sinking out of sight.
Christie Hodgen | Interview in New Letters - Spring ‘21
You pack every good thing you can find into the poem until its seams are bursting. And it still holds together… I’ve had the same sensation, reading your work, that I had when I first read Whitman…
John Field | Poor Rude Lines - June ‘24
The Flaws in the Story is a dizzying encounter with a mind. It is humane and earthed but, from the safety and familiarity of this platform, somehow, Strauss switches gravity off.
Mary Jo Bang | Marsh Hawk Press Prize 2023
Like Penelope’s daily weaving… each of these fascinating poems is part of a larger story, each an exquisitely observed vignette that pinpoints a moment of conversation, or observation, or travel… Unputdownable, as in ‘so gripping as to be read right through at one sitting.’
Burt Kimmelman | Marsh Hawk Review
Long-lined excursus, which breathe new life into truism and tautology, go on and on in wonderfully kooky, twisted apothegms—all part of the great fun Liane Strauss offers her readers in The Flaws in the Story. Her jaunty, garrulous wit fashions shaggy-dog tales I wish never to end. Some of them don’t.
selected poems
I Need To Learn To Lie Better
My grandmother was the Barnum & Bailey of liars. I could hear her head shaking when I told Frederick
what I really thought about his grandmother
The You You Were
I dreamed of you again last night,
though you’ve been dead these twenty years
to me, and in the dream you were
again yourself. But is that right?
My Meninas and the Moon
My meninas are as changeable as the moon.
Black and white and in color.
Happy, sad, and how many words there are
for red enough and the pallor of skin.
The Lovers In The Photograph
After a moment it became clear.
It had never been bound.
It wasn’t part of the book.
The Yellow Dress
Inevitable city, coming back to you, like dreaming
–it all seems real,
I take for granted that it’s half invented,
