True Mistakes

Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer and artist. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Best New Poets, Narrative, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New York.

"In True Mistakes, Lena Moses-Schmitt's fabulous debut, this superb poet and visual artist narrows the distance between faces and flowers, between death and children, thinking and living, making art and seeing the future. Moses-Schmitt teaches us to eye with suspicion the marks on any surface (whether page, painting, or pavement), and at the same time to practice making ourselves available to being moved. The poet holds these two impulses in expert, thrilling tension. I loved reading this book. It's left me all stirred up!" --Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book and In the Rhododendrons "Who are we to ourselves? Alone or in the world, in the past or in the future? Can we change, or stop changing? Who is reflected in 'the painting, which is actually the window'? True Mistakes is full of movement, and its poems are endlessly questing--that effort which suggests both a search and a question. They make living an act of asking." --Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self