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Alive

New and Selected Poems

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
American poet Elizabeth Willis has written an electrifying body of work spanning more than twenty years. With a wild and inquisitive lyricism, Willis—“one of the most outstanding poets of her generation” (Susan Howe)—draws us into intricate patterns of thought and feeling. The intimate and civic address of these poems is laced with subterranean affinities among painters, botanists, politicians, witches and agitators. Coursing through this work is the clarity and resistance of a world that asks the poem to rise to this, to speak its fury.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 16, 2015
      Willis (Address) has been enthralling, challenging, and frustrating the poetry cognoscenti with hermetic, allusive, scholarly, and startlingly opaque verse and prose since the early 1990s: “When I point to the island I mean a body on a map. Think about the heart: it doesn’t have to form a sentence.” Her prose blocks, strings of sentences, and short, dense lines tend to reach toward the mind before the heart, and this selected volume, her first, might engage more (and baffle fewer) readers if it is read backward, the newest poems first. The evocative declarations within her prose poems—especially in 2006’s Meteoric Flowers—belie the evasions their imagined voices imply: “What sudden rhetoric trembles at the door? I see clouds reflected in the gutter, but they’re still clouds.” And her earlier investigations of lyric form and elusive meaning require deep thought and deliberation: “Human understanding is a savage construction// of dilation and resistance... We live in a sunspot// ‘little o.’” Willis also stands out for the many various ways she uses sources from the visual arts, incorporating Ruskin, Giorgione, J.M.W. Turner, Joseph Cornell, and William Blake. Willis’s challenging, cerebral work rewards the patient reader, and this selection should help her reach a wider audience.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from April 15, 2015

      The recipient of multiple honors (e.g., the National Poetry Series, a Guggenheim), Willis offers the penetrating musings and sometimes fragmented syntax of a contemporary Emily Dickinson but can feel like a spirited surrealist ("Though my heart were a pear tree/ threaded with fire/ Lion you leapt through me/ like fineness in the boundary gene"). Starting stringently and getting richer with cultural and political references as it proceeds, this Selected offers gems from five collections and culminates in a dozen new or uncollected pieces. Grab it.

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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