About Loisa Fenichell

“The sentences in Loisa Fenichell’s aptly named Wandering in all directions of this earth enact a journey at once outward and inward, an odyssey through urban and bucolic spaces, across dreamlike bridges ‘that lead to more bridges,’ backward and forward in time, and deeper into the fathomless self. A leg that begins in darkest extremity might pirouette into technicolor whimsy; grief and loneliness give way to a richness of language; and privation and pain find magical answers via metaphor’s deranging escape route from the harshness of the real: ‘I fainted / and convulsed, so found myself a small red boat, / like the booths of a diner, in which to sail away.’ If poetic quicksilver lightens her path, the poet is likewise haunted by the fear that nothing (and no one, not even the self) stays or stabilizes long enough to set root in completely and call one’s own. The truth of this exuberant, crushing book is that only the fixity of the written page—analogous to that of its photographs—offers us evidence of who we (or another) might be or have been, and of what it feels or felt like to be here, alive on this earth, if only for a time.”

— Timothy Donnelly, author of Chariot, The Problem of the Many, and others (blurb of Wandering in all directions of this earth, forthcoming from Ghost Peach Press September 2023, selected by Eduardo C. Corral as winner of the Ghost Peach Press 2022 Poetry Prize)

Loisa Fenichell’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets, and has been featured or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, all these urban fields, was published by nothing to say press and her collection, Wandering in all directions of this earth, which was a Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize finalist in 2021 and 2022, was the winner of the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize, selected by Yale Younger Poets Prize winner Eduardo C. Corral, and published by Ghost Peach Press. She is the winner of the 2021 Bat City Review Editors' Prize, has been a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 2021 30 Below contest, a runner-up for Tupelo Quarterly's Tupelo Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Dorianne Laux / Joe Millar prize. She has received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and Community of Writers and holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University.

Email: lfenichell@gmail.com
Instagram: @loisa_fenichell  

Please don’t hesitate to contact.

Currently located in Oakland, CA.