Elizabeth Willis has long been hailed as one of the most important, most singular contemporary poets working today, and this portable collection brings the best of her incomparable poems together, including previously uncollected and new work.
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
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