METAMOURPHOSIS

fifth wheel press, 2024

A portmanteau. A pun. A poem. With humor. With love. With pathos. With joy. With purpose. With whimsy. With pleasure. Alison Lubar’s Metamorphousis is all of this and more. Read it and be delighted.

— Julie R. Enszer, author of THE PINKO COMMIE DYKE, editor and publisher of Sinister Wisdom

The love songs of METAMOURPHOSIS croon out to “all heavenly bodies,” a journey of “alchemical romance,” “ablaze with our waking.” On these pages, desire germinates, hybridizes and effloresces. How do we love when our days are numbered, our relationships maligned unjustly, our planet in a state of chaos? The poems answer by celebrating queer love and magic– radiant with the ever-blooming natural world, shot through with devotion and care, and sparkling like the cosmos. And too, this luscious book touches loss, because the poet knows “time is/ the only luxury,” one we cannot take for granted. Lubar’s wise, carefully wrought poems chronicle the work of living urgently, loving abundantly, and sharing the bounty. My heart is full with the charm, energy, and vitality of their voice. 

— Mónica Gomery, winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, Sappho Prize for Women Poets and the Minola Review Poetry Contest, and author of Might Kindred, winner of the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry

Alison Lubar’s METAMOURPHOSIS is a song to love lost and found. It is a song to the most delicious memories, and it is a song to wild queer joy. Lubar writes, “Now I write to keep the light in.”, and the light that shines through this book will brighten the reader long after they finish the very last poem. METAMOURPHOSIS is a book you’ll want to devour again and again. 

—Nicole Tallman, Poetry Ambassador for Miami and Author of FERSACE: POEMS

With lush euphony, Metamourphosis digs into the earth of the saphhic. Lubar spins heady moments of yearning to fall into willingly, like grief-bound lemming to impending cliff. This is poetry that is all claws under silk gloves in smoke-drenched, liminal-tense space, spells that leave you in the apex of the threat-induced gasp. 

—Emily Perkovich, Querencia Press EIC & author of baby, sweetheart, honey

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it skips a generation

Stanchion, 2023

"While confronting all that condemns the mixed-race descendants of Japanese Americans as “other” in America, Lubar’s collection lays plain the complicated tension of the speaker’s resistance to and simultaneous longing for her Japanese heritage. Peppered with brackets that add to this making and remaking of the speaker’s sense of self, it skips a generation is ultimately a hard-won account of loss, acceptance, and the pride and grief that come with knowing “I inherit it all.” 

– Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca

"Love permeates It Skips a Generation in surprising ways, in ways that unsettle familial history with curiosity and determination. This book interrogates what it means to belong and how that interrogation can become a pursuit of love and understanding. Lubar carries us through these difficult questions, refusing easy answers with a line that won’t leave me anytime soon—“And I’m still exotic, too, and so lucky, too, to seem so foreign and dangerous and willing to bite.” 

– Su Cho, author of The Symmetry of Fish

"Alison Lubar opens up the hopeful equation--that one can survive, even evade the traumas of war and internment by bringing a time traveling and capacious attention to bear on a mixed-race family. Loved ones shimmer to life in these sun-filled tableaux of affection, puns, pain d'epi, squid broth, and observation. It is no small act of care to give eternal home both to elders and to one's own defiance--in poetry." 

– Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of Futureless Languages and Continuity

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sweet euphemism

CLASH! 2023

sweet euphemism enacts a haunting and a reclamation that in calling out to past and present ancestral lineages, both harkening from and pushing against racialized violence, one can be re-born and connected to our dead who enable us to live. These are profoundly thoughtful poems. A stunning achievement.

–Addie Tsai, author of Unwieldy Creatures and Dear Twin

Alison Lubar catches “crack[s] of light” to render immortal truths that might otherwise be forgotten. With the tenderest care and the deftest touch, they navigate intergenerational hurt through their Auntie E’s memories of the internment camps the only way they can: by giving the formless form, by fathoming the unfathomable. Existential fear warps with familial responsibility in this searing, melancholic, and joyful work, where safeguarding assumes new configurations and survival becomes the anthem of the day. This is a collection with teeth—and necessary reading.

—Mandy Moe Pwint Tu, author of Monsoon Daughter and Unsprung

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Philosophers Know Nothing About Love

Debut Chapbook, Thirty West Publishing House, 2022

“Alison Lubar's debut glitters with sensuality. It feels like a journey toward the knowledge of love, how to both grasp and savor it. Philosophers Know Nothing About Love contains gorgeous poems reflecting on philosophy, the body, and desire. Each piece drips decadence and transcendence. I want to slip into something silky, uncork a bottle of wine, light a candle, and indulge in this chapbook all over again.”

—Christina Rosso, Author of Creole Conjure

“Alison Lubar's Philosophers Know Nothing About Love is instantly recognizable as a triumph of language and the imagination. Its dreaminess, melodic charm, and entrancing sensual imagery have the extraordinary effect of slowing or halting time itself. What then emerges from each poem are these glimpses into a higher reality, the uncanny "sublime" beyond all mortal comprehension, gorgeously rendered to the page. Enchanting, otherworldy, intimate, and enthralling, Lubar's debut is beyond what we call a stroke of brilliance; rather, it is a reflection of a doubtless talent, sure to sweep away their readers time and time again.⁠”

—Jonathan Koven, author of Palm Lines and Below Torrential Hill

“Lubar writes for mouthfeel. I want a second helping. I want to roll these poems around my cheeks. It’s the kind of book (and writer) I’d like to invite out for a drink.”

—Steph Castor, author of Keep Her In Your Mouth and Bedroom Music

“Built on the framework of Plato's allegory of the cave, Alison Lubar's chapbook, Philosophers Know Nothing About Love, explorers desire in liminal spaces. Their collection of embodied queer love poetry, with its "chorus in capillaries," also works as literary theory. Plato is an interesting choice for a poet because he wasn't a fan. For Plato, poetry incites passions at the expense of reason. Lubar's poems seem to respond, "bring it on!" The poems take us to hotel lobbies, escalators, and gift shops: places where we have lost our sense of direction, places that might challenge our assumptions about ourselves and how we know the world. Put these poems in your mouth and bite down on the living oyster.”

—Amy Beth Sisson, MFA Candidate at Rutgers University

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