First Time, Every Time - Titus Lisa

In Lisa Titus' debut collection First Time, Every Time, the everyday becomes something mythic. "Feral and alive like the hot breath of birth," these poems straddle "the empty space between panic and bliss." There is playfulness and humor as well as devotion to craft. I felt like an intruder spying on the most intimate moments in the lives of the people who populate these poems. Sometimes I wasn't prepared for what I encountered, but this unexpectedness is part of the journey.

-Jason Irwin, Author of The History of Our Vagrancies

First Time, Every Time is a ride-along with an earth goddess disguised as a bartender, poet, mother, lover and teacher. Tactile, nervy, sticky, glimmering and foreboding, Titus is incapable of spinning without belief, incanting, manifesting and celebrating the flawed and feckless life of the loving and well-loved, polishing and releasing the threads of the everyday heartbreaks and torpor. This book is a walk in the woods, a drink with a friend, a hand on your back.

-Louisa Lam, Collaborator, Asian American Modernism with Abang-guard