Lying In
Milkweed Editions (Verlag)
978-1-63955-010-4 (ISBN)
“All my life all I’ve wanted was to be myself / and someone else,” writes Elizabeth Metzger. From the shadowy perspective of confinement, where the presence of death unsettles all outcomes, these poems examine an expansion and fracturing of the self—into motherhood as well as childhood, into past selves and future unknowns. The child becomes parent, the parent becomes child, the child arrives but in doing so is lost. New loss haunts new life, and life becomes “one or two lives.” The door is more valuable than the prize behind it.
With ambivalence as well as deep feeling, Metzger wonders how a single body can be expected to hold both immense joy and immense mourning, profound longing and creeping numbness, when one so often overtakes the other. She plunges into the darkness inside—of the gloomy room, the inner body, the afterlife and the pre-language mind—and sends back “a searchlight across the underworld,” Eurydice in search of herself.
Aching and contemplative, Lying In is an exquisite portrait of an in-between time—and of the person who emerges on the other side. “Isn’t it obvious how we’ve changed?”
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In, as well as and The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poem-a-Day. Her essays have been published in Boston Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, PN Review, and Literary Hub, among others. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and she lives in California.
1
Lying In . 3
Won Exit . 9
First Wound Kept Open . 10
We Are Often in Danger of Departing . 12
You’ve Been on Earth So Long Already . 13
Exaggerated Honey . 15
Picture of the Floating World . 17
Patient Mentality . 19
Not My Child . 20
The Witching Hour . 22
Moses, New York . 25
2
Welcome . 29
The Whole Way . 30
With Wayward Motion . 31
Early Rising . 34
Last of Kin . 36
First Anniversary . 37
Ultrasound . 39
A Birth Interrupted On and Off by the World . 40
Guest House . 41
For My Mother Wanting Children . 42
Inmate of Happiness . 43
Mid-Supper . 45
Godface . 49
The Impossibility of Crows . 50
Wrong Distance . 52
The End That Followed . 54
Mercy Later . 56
Verisimilitude . 57
Almost One . 58
So I Finally Slept . 59
The Flat Chapel . 61
One More Day . 62
Every Child Alone . 64
4
As Long As They Want . 69
The God Incentive . 70
Sex Dream . 71
Marriage . 72
Roach . 73
On a Clear Night . 75
Mother Nothing . 76
Daughter as Myself . 79
What Are the Chances . 80
Desire . 82
Notes . 83
Acknowledgments . 85
| Erscheinungsdatum | 16.03.2023 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | Illustrations, unspecified |
| Verlagsort | Minneapolis |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 139 x 215 mm |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Lyrik / Gedichte |
| ISBN-10 | 1-63955-010-0 / 1639550100 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-63955-010-4 / 9781639550104 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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