Scroll down for audiobook/spoken-word poetry album with excerpts and purchase links  

God in Her Ruffled Dress

The second collection of poems from Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) explores the human/divine interface – body and spirit, illness and wellness, temporal and eternal – in rich, inventive, musical poems. Here erotic desire is central, feminist awareness inherent, gender many-faceted, and the lyrical impulse ever-present. 

Published by the L.A.-based literary publisher What Books Press, it reached all online booksellers Dec. 4, 2023, after a soft publication mid-October. It was released as an audiobook/spoken-word poetry album with new, original background music directly by Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) via Findaway Voices by Spotify, rolling out late July 2024 and reaching most audiobook platforms by Labor Day 2024. 

With 41 poems, including a Prelude and a Coda each offering a poem-prayer, the volume has four sections: 
“Return to the Body” delves into the author’s longstanding type 1 diabetes, Biblical scripture, and spiritual transformation. 
“Drum the Beginning of the World” offers homages to jazz masters and explores Lisa B’s practice as a vocalist.
“Sever the Head” comprises poems inspired by pandemic politics. 
Finally, “Propagate" probes love, sensuality, birth, and death. 

Press and Excerpts (see complete press here)

“An invitation to experience God as ‘the one I know.’… Lisa B uses her experience of living with type 1 diabetes to convey the intimate edge between life and death.“ - Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer, Harbor Review

             “From its provocative title to the last sentence, this…heretical book surprises, devastates, and delights.“ - Bethany Reid, Calyx

“Strange, musical, funny, sexy poems. Look no further for a deeply spiritual, feminist celebration in verse.” - Diana Whitney, Girl Trouble

              “To write about Billie Holiday is treacherous because the formulaic is frozen through decades of repetition, but when Bernstein, in “Billie Goes Home,” imagines her saying or thinking, ‘Growl to me, Mister, / please,’ I am charmed and touched.”- Michael Steinman, Jazz Lives

“A multifaceted collection that challenges the reader’s…understanding of topics from gender to eroticism…powerful physicality associated with the divine that is seldom approached so boldly.” - A. R. Arthur, Full House Review

             “A playful, soulful, feminist imagining of how we experience the sacred.” - Broad Street Review, Best of 2023

Endorsements

“A book of deep seeing…also a book of intense listening... a series of divine pleasures” - D.A. Powell

             “Effortlessly surprising, thoughtful, and inventive…musical and rhythmical…terrific.” - Sean Singer

“Superb poems...that call down the spirit" - Daniel Tiffany

             “Bears écriture feminine into the twenty-first century with grace, wit, and incredible technical dexterity” - Kristina Marie Darling

“A dazzling lyrical demonstration…from the highs of great jazz performance to the zen of blood testing for diabetes.” - Lawrence R. Smith

            “Stunning…weaves together body, spirituality, politics, and the world we live in…will stir your mind and bring you into beauty” - Kelli Russell Agodon

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