From a Lisbon Rooftop by Eric Steineger
Eric Steineger teaches English at Mars Hill University. He is the Senior Poetry Editor of The Citron Review, while his work has been featured in The Los Angeles Review, Rattle: The Poets Respond, Waxwing, Asheville Poetry Review, and other journals. Occasionally, he curates poetry events for Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and teaches in UNC-Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program. He lives in Asheville with his wife and daughter.
Praise for From a Lisbon Rooftop : Alone at the local wine bar, breathing in the weatherless air of the office, in urban pockets quiet as the country, Eric Steineger’s personae compel by virtue of keen observation, yes, but also through their minds’ conjoining of physics and metaphysics. Dualisms catch fire and burn like lovers dancing the fandango with paper cups of brandy among the flâneurs who call their estranged city home. The poems in Eric Steineger’s From a Lisbon Rooftopare certainly an ode to the profoundly polyphonous Fernando Pessoa, particularly the Bernardo Soares of Pessoa’s prose masterpiece The Book of Disquiet; too, they take Pessoa’s fractaled ars poetica and rehang it in some new, glittering constellation. I like to imagine Pessoa is hunched somewhere over a plate of grilled sardines and a glass of Vinho Verde, eyes closed, the sun on his hand on this book.
Justin Bigos