Blue Venus is the newest poetry collection by Lisa Russ Spaar (winner of the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women writers and Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing, University of Virginia) and one that continues the theme of insomnia by exploring the sleeplessness of such fascinating personalities as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas Merton, the great hypnotist Mesmer, and others. An impressive anthology of original work, Spaar's poetry also reveals the intimate relationship between the sensual and the sacred, as well as other seemingly opposing or juxtaposing elements of the human experience. The Insomnia of Mesmer: In our afternoon sessions, lockets of magnetic light blur/the spines of firs in the private holiday of her induced sleep,//childish, her eyes widen, devoted to a glair/of inward, fabled knowledge I choreograph and keep//secret. At night, in the desolate hair shirt/of her absence, I own the lodestone of her weeping://it bespeaks the silence of her cloistered tongue--/a zone I cannot enter but whose passion I reap,//lured like geese honing off over the Danube, restlessly/obedient to laws chauvinistic and infidel--and deepening.