Issa Lewis offers both ode and elegy to a way of life by recording the history of one Michigan farming family. In 20 sonnets, Lewis attempts to answer the speaker’s central question: “What holds a house together?” She traces a family from early 20^th century homestead through WWII and on to the end of the century, and even when the people have left the land and the house, the ghosts continue to hold. Infinite Collisions is a testament to Lewis’ skills as a poet and to her love for her subjects.

–Sandy Longhorn, author of The Alchemy of My Mortal Form

I marvel at these poems.  From the opening lines of the collection, Issa Lewis deftly performs her theme, illuminating for the reader how life stitches us into place and how memory coheres in the material world once we’re gone. In the middle of the book, a son leaves for war as a mother sews, “red thread weaving in and through,” and “only when she sets the blue star’s place/ does she drop the needle, hide her face.”  The reader intuits that Lewis continues a family tradition of witness, of skill.  These poems know the complex interweaving of grief and loveliness.

 –Joanna Penn Cooper, author of What Is a Domicile