John’s Table: Poems by Lesle Lewis

Reviewed by Pearl Pirie

Lesle Lewis’ John’s Table is part of the lineup put out by new publisher Piżama Press in 2026. It’s an 86-page single sectioned book, and the 6th full poetry collection of Lesle. Her debut collection, Small Boat, was the winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. I liked it very much, and marked up at least half of the digital ARC. A comparable writer might be Lillian Nećakov.

It is offbeat and yet welcoming, take for example, the poem “Talk”, p. 12, which takes place “in a wide mystical parking lot.”, which becomes affably a conversation with the imagined audience,

Find a door.
The door.
You’ve locked the door and locked me out.
I can’t find the door.
So I’m in.
Here’s the rich, inner life of my sugar house.

It continues in this playful tetchy vein of mock pouts, “I feel that now everything is okay, but this feeling doesn’t negate the other nagging feeling that everything of course is not okay.” She writes with humour without undercutting or ignoring that there are stakes. In this way, she addresses the heavy world, but doesn’t sink us in its quicksand. She does likewise in “Lake”, p. 17, “Whatever happens happens now./Red painted monuments bloom./It’s a messy, wild-growing grief.”

If I might quote another review by Donna Stonecipher, “Lewis knows that the situation we find ourselves in is far too serious for sentiment, yet she also knows that once we stop feeling, we’re doomed. ‘There are no revelations,’ she writes, ‘just ongoingness.’ The hard-won wisdom encapsulated in these poems radiates through every line.”

It is somehow touching the profound while it walks among us without any gilding. We can sit with how everything isn’t a monolithic story lesson. Let all the chaos in and acknowledge that without threat. This is a world view I don’t see enough of. As Lewis put it in “Need” p. 20, “Its parts don’t combine but they stand close together./ We choose to sit like a good person at a good table eating a/ good sandwich./ Our differing views taken together make clear how complicated/ this is./ Your loneliness meets mine online./ The situation is discovered while we make it.”

Rather than a subtext of a meaningful universe, it is of how we continue by continuing as demonstrated in “Rain”, p. 42-43 where the particulates in the air are as if a divided self and the line “The water flattens and holds itself together,” lands as if the world models how to adjust yourself to not fly apart. Flatter, flatter, calmer, because the constant resistance is exhausting and depleting. Find instead the concrete, the real. This context is ably rapt in the poem as. “It’s worrisome when the truth conditions depend on repetition of the statements.” A poetry of resistance can also be refusing to jump to the tyrants’ rope.

It is gratifying to read and reread, with funny, relatable bon mots such as, p. 42, “I schedule the worrying for later when I might be braver.”

Piżama Press (www.pizamapress.com) is “an independent press dedicated to highlighting and uplifting the voices of the weird, the uncanny, the absurd, the strange, and the surreal”.

About the Author

Lesle Lewis is the author of six full-length collections of poems, including her debut collection, Small Boat, which won the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. She lives in the rough New Hampshire woods with the rest of the trees.

About the Reviewer

Pearl Pirie is in Hills’ Almanach des Collines, an anthology of Gatineau Hills spec fiction 2026, and in The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, 2025 and a forthcoming issues of The Fiddlehead and Kingfisher. She is an English book reviews co-editor of Haiku Canada Review. Recently in chapbooks: Heat Lamp (above/ground press, 2025), We Astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, 2025), and edited for phafours press: Crime and Ornament by Tamsyn Farr (Nov 2025). www.pearlpirie.com

Book Details

• Piżama Press

• Publication date: May 27, 2026

• 70 pages