Additional Book Information
Series: NYRB Poets
ISBN: 9781590178645
Pages: 208
Publication Date: April 14, 2015
AliveNew and Selected Poems
by Elizabeth Willis
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.
Praise
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