Liz Waldner

Poetry. The poems in Liz Waldner's HER FAITHFULNESS surprise and sustain. The world they know is daily harmed and harming, and they summon resources against its meanness: the natural world where sight of an indigo bunting or blue lizard presents the kingdom of heaven, a fragment of song or local speech carrying memory and feeling. All of the themes and inventiveness of Waldner's eight earlier books are part of HER FAITHFULNESS, here condensed to their essence in poems wild and smart and joyful and wise near the end of their journey: After a long time, I came to love's house / where I was invited to stay. These playful meditations on sex, passion and, above all, the desire for a home, belie the intensity animating them. When Waldner names the 'god' she wants 'she, ' it's easy to overlook the erased option--'goddess'--that implies the co-existence of a male god. Waldner's position is clear: the only singular god is she. And she, the only 'Mercy' worth wanting, is the 'good.' HER FAITHFULNESS, the story of Waldner's peripatetic life, rewards a reading, to say nothing of her readers, faithful to the end.--Tyrone Williams The difference between looking anywhere you can and looking anywhere you want reasons the weather of these exquisite poems, inside which malady, melody, severity, doubt, and pleasure approach and pass to be claimed by a voice too beautiful to ever stop listening for. Liz Waldner may be here to show us how joy made sad gets to keep being joy, how to be beheld by meanness and not be it. This is the work of a vital, profuse mind undeniably at home in poetry.--Kathleen Peirce Liz Waldner is a poet of high wit, high intelligence, and great musical rigor--she may be our Postmodern Metaphysical poet plummeting deeper and deeper with each book into the questions of self, sexuality, and knowing.--Gillian Conoley

A philosophical, tough, and often funny inquiry into twenty-first-century selfhood, Liz Waldner's new collection of poems takes shape in the shadow of Dante's "dark wood." Dark Would (the missing person) is quirky. It's audaciously American, out of the Dickinson house. Waldner uses short, quick syntactical units that swerve rather than build up an architecture of ideas through sequential juxtaposition. She also has, like Dickinson, a canny, carnal, specifying diction. Her poems are sonorous, sly, and sexy. They are political in their address of gender through reference to pop songs, poems, and analyses of personal experiences. The resulting wry permutations of will and desire alternately leaf and hew an American "dark wood." The pages and paths turn to and through the kinds of lostness and foundness to which rootlessness gives rise.

These poems are explorations into the personal, social, and political nature of speech. While this poet speaks of the identity as a product of class, gender, history, and language, she nonetheless demands attention be paid to the individual as a constellation of these speaking agencies.

This collection of poems explores various kinds of longing and loss - sex, death, exile, story, love, and time. These poems draw from culture, both high and low - Eno and Aquinas, Lassie and Donne, Silicon Valley and Walden Pond.