In the foreword to Talking Cure (1982) Cynthia McDonald calls Lisa Zeidner's poetry "fugal": "The new lines enter, extending the work past the natural stopping point of each phase so the poems continually re-engage." Zeidner's repetition and interweaving of ideas exist in each poem as well as in the cumulative scheme of the collections. Her major themes--time, love, sex, birth, death, individual personal worth, and God--continually reappear with an adequate amount of tension and humor to prevent these familiar poetic subjects from becoming hackneyed.

Lisa Zeidner was born on 27 March 1955 in Washington, D.C., to Joseph and Dorothy Zeidner. In 1976 she received her B.A. in English from Carnegie-Mellon. She earned her M.A. from Johns Hopkins in 1977, and though she entered the doctoral program at Washington University in Saint Louis, she did not complete the degree. Zeidner's poetry has appeared in many magazines and journals, including the Antioch...