"The way Paul Fisher sees the world and writes about it is pure delight! An Exaltation of Tongues is full of astounding images and the wisdom of his shaman voice - 'from the green blood of grass / to the moon's missing half.' I love the nuances, the leaping alchemical word magic, and the vision in these poems - 'sweet as stolen honey / ladled from the Great Bear's tongue.' I love the way his poems leap between worlds, and the transparency of emotion is stunning. Every line has the magic I have come to enjoy in Paul Fisher's writing."
Diane Frank, Author of Canon for Bears and Ponderosa Pines
"Paul Fisher's An Exaltation of Tongues is accessible and then unusual, for it does not receive a spirit, speaking in tongues, unknowable and nourished somehow on high . . . Authority, instead, is given with such a light touch - to 'my tongue'; to 'your burnt tongue'; to 'double-edged" and 'severed tongues'. His poetry sustains affirmation in an unaffirming, unsustainable world."
Judith Hall, author of The Promised Folly
Author Biography:
Paul Fisher was born and raised in Seattle where he currently lives with his wife, Linda, and where his grandfather, an immigrant from eastern Europe, settled in 1904. Because of economic necessity and a desire to broaden his horizons, Paul has lived and worked in more places around the country than he cares to think about. As a result, though he loves the Pacific Northwest, and its rugged landscapes haunt his dreams, his sense of place has expanded like space to include a multitude of universes. Paul is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Oregon Arts Commission. His first Book, Rumors of Shore, won the 2009 Blue Light Book Award, and was published in 2010. His poems have appeared in journals, including The Antioch Review, Cave Wall, The Centrifugal Eye, Crab Creek Review, Cutthroat, The Ekphrastic Review, Naugatuck River Review, Nimrod, Pedestal, Sow's Ear, Switched-on Gutenberg, and in the best-selling anthology, River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the 21st Century. Some of his visual art has been exhibited at the Lyme Art Association Gallery in Old Lyme, CT, the Craft Alliance Center for Art & Design in St. Louis, MO, and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle.
