ANNA LEWIS
Anna Lewis was born and raised in New Jersey. She studied literature at Rutgers, the Sorbonne, and Yale. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Yale Review Online, The Washington Post, First Things, MEASURE, Modern Age, and elsewhere. She works in the technology industry and lives in Durham, North Carolina with her husband and son. Memory’s Abacus is her first book.
Lewis’s debut collection of poetry, Memory’s Abacus, is available HERE.
Praise for Memory’s Abacus
Here’s what matters about a book of poems: Does the poet know what to do with language? (Is it vigorous and surprising yet inevitable? Does it make music—or is it merely prose? Does it lead us into meaning?) If the answer is yes, it’s a book of poems worth celebrating—and the answer is yes for this first book of poems from Anna Lewis. May there be many more.
—Jane Greer, author of Love Like a Conflagration and The World as We Know It Is Falling Away
What else is there, Anna Lewis asks in her eponymous poem, “but this / one life, that’s more, / almost, than we can bear?” With hushed precision and flawless delicacy, the poems in Memory’s Abacus chart how close to unbearable life can be even as they celebrate its beauties. A line of laundry, spring petals, a child’s acquisition of language: all are occasions for ardent attention. What might seem everyday details build, in the architecture of this collection, into a construct as durably radiant as a book of hours or a liturgical calendar.
Without a trace of sentimentality or sententiousness, Lewis offers us a guide to a life lived with gratitude and awe, with an attentiveness that misses nothing—not a season, not a death in the family, not the yard of the day care. Such a celebratory gathering of poems is itself an occasion for gratitude.”
—Rachel Hadas, author of Ghost Guest and Pandemic Almanac
Purchase Memory’s Abacus: Poems.
Anna Lewis was born and raised in New Jersey. She studied literature at Rutgers, the Sorbonne, and Yale. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Yale Review Online, The Washington Post, First Things, MEASURE, Modern Age, and elsewhere. She works in the technology industry and lives in Durham, North Carolina with her husband and son. Memory’s Abacus is her first book.
Lewis’s debut collection of poetry, Memory’s Abacus, is available HERE.
Praise for Memory’s Abacus
Here’s what matters about a book of poems: Does the poet know what to do with language? (Is it vigorous and surprising yet inevitable? Does it make music—or is it merely prose? Does it lead us into meaning?) If the answer is yes, it’s a book of poems worth celebrating—and the answer is yes for this first book of poems from Anna Lewis. May there be many more.
—Jane Greer, author of Love Like a Conflagration and The World as We Know It Is Falling Away
What else is there, Anna Lewis asks in her eponymous poem, “but this / one life, that’s more, / almost, than we can bear?” With hushed precision and flawless delicacy, the poems in Memory’s Abacus chart how close to unbearable life can be even as they celebrate its beauties. A line of laundry, spring petals, a child’s acquisition of language: all are occasions for ardent attention. What might seem everyday details build, in the architecture of this collection, into a construct as durably radiant as a book of hours or a liturgical calendar.
Without a trace of sentimentality or sententiousness, Lewis offers us a guide to a life lived with gratitude and awe, with an attentiveness that misses nothing—not a season, not a death in the family, not the yard of the day care. Such a celebratory gathering of poems is itself an occasion for gratitude.”
—Rachel Hadas, author of Ghost Guest and Pandemic Almanac
Purchase Memory’s Abacus: Poems.
