Alive

Description

Called by Susan Howe "one of the most outstanding poets of her generation," the American poet Elizabeth Willis has written some of the most luminous, electrifyingly lyrical poems of the past twenty years. This collection includes work from her five books, poems previously published only in magazines, and a section of new poems. With a poetics as attentive to the music of thought as George Oppen's and an ear that evokes the wildness of Rimbaud's Illuminations, Willis charts intricate, subterranean affinities. Her poems draw us into a range of pleasures and concerns-from the scientific pastorals of Erasmus Darwin, to the domain of painters, politicians, erstwhile saints, witches, and agitators. Within the intimate and civic address of these poems, we witness the chaos of the contemporary world as it falls, for an ecstatic moment, into place: "The word comes at me with its headlights on, so it's revelation and not death."

Elizabeth Willis is an American poet and literary critic. She has written several poetry collections including Meteoric Flowers, The Human Abstract, which was selected for the National Poetry Series, and most recently, Address. She is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and residencies at Brown University and the MacDowell Colony. She currently serves as the Shapiro-Silverberg professor of literature and creative writing at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

"Willis offers the penetrating musings and sometimes fragmented syntax of a contemporary Emily Dickinson but can feel like a spirited surrealist...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." -Library Journal, starred review "More people should be reading Elizabeth Willis, one of our most gifted and historically attuned poets." - Jennifer Chang, Los Angeles Review of Books "Willis's poetry offers a site where the lyrical and social collide in productive ways, where epiphany is short-circuited just as it is about to 'transcend' experience, where the political runs aground on, against, implacable language, implacable 'experience.'" - Tyrone Williams, Bird Dog "An amazing collision of the vulnerable and the mighty, the perishable and the explosive, the mundane and the cosmic." - Stefania Heim, Boston Review Praise for The Human Abstract "These poems move with an uncanny precision to sound thought and the body it makes manifest. No one speaks more clearly in such subtle webs of feeling. Nor is there any other who can so bring us home. Elizabeth Willis is a master." -Robert Creeley "The Human Abstract returns the abstract to the essence of language, reviving our ears to the essential music of our humanity. In this music, we begin to construct for ourselves a dwelling made of incidents whose origins are as near as Sappho's celebrated fragments, Dickinson's wonderful prisms. In this collection, Elizabeth Willis recovers the originating lyric impulse into a haunting contemporary song. This is poetry of amazing intelligence and grace." -Ann Lauterbach "Dislocating the self's topology, Elizabeth Willis's mysterious poems emerge as shattered musical phrases, brilliantly in and out of key, exactly scored-meaning to sound the alarming tick and wobble of she who is born into the world at this historic moment. Her wary foot enters the room, her ear gathers its signals cunningly, and she's gone. We follow, compelled by this urgent hermetic reading of human event, fastened to her sorrow and appetite." -Kathleen Fraser Praise for Turneresque "Indulging in the quintessentially poetic art of associating things that have never been found together before, Willis...here combines the haunting luminosity of English painter J. M. W. Turner with the lucid black-and-white of American film noir, along with the darkly visionary poetry of Rimbaud, Blake and Baudelaire." -Publishers Weekly "Affirmative, even jocularly courageous. It seems-to borrow one of its own phrases-'to imply or intone the whole possibility of human sun.' "-Cole Swenson, Rain Taxi