"The Fix is ruthless, sleepless, vigilant, obsessive: a profound work of mystery and matter, of power and pleasure, in which any singular truth is always just a step ahead, a bit beyond reach, below sight line. The multiplicity of meanings, however, blossom at a touch, on sight. What to call this book’s voluptuous precision of murk—its world both so ‘blown open’ and yet so attentive to beauty? This new voice is so strange it sounds familiar, like family unforgivable or a lover who’s never over... You’ll read this brilliant book again and again looking for the way back from it." —Brenda Shaughnessy, Judge’s Citation
“Full and luscious as a grape before wine-making or a moon before love-making, the poems in The Fix live in a roadside space that’s earthy, sensual, erotic, and wild. Lisa Wells writes by feel, shaping, kneading, and bending the line the way a potter builds a ceramic vessel from the bottom up, coiling around a central idea until it’s solid, visible, and ready to be marveled at.” —D. A. Powell
“The Fix is perfectly executed. It’s always poetry, yet it never strains to be poetry. It’s flush with nervous and yet confidently directed energy. Its most striking moments are never haphazard, but are surprising and indelible. It doesn’t read like a first book, it reads like a book for life.” —Shane McCrae
“Lisa Wells knows all too well that a fix is just a habitual stay against the moment’s decay, and in these corporeal poems equal parts binge and purge, one can only wonder what rough bitch slouches down low to be reborn in a Paradise as dirty and comfy as a trucker’s blown rig.”
—Timothy Liu
Cover Design by Kristen Radtke