"The Human Abstract", writers Lauterbach, "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....This is poetry of amazing intelligence and grace.

The Human Abstract (THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES)

Literature & Fiction

Willis, Elizabeth

Poetry

Penguin Group USA

"To disrupt the relationship of predator and prey, to reshape one's relation to power, is to renovate the lived and living world," Elizabeth Willis writes in her visionary work that delves deep into the ancient enchantments and disciplinary displays of the circus. Liontaming in America investigates the utopian aspirations fleetingly enacted in the polyamorous life of a nineteenth-century Mormon community, interweaving archival and personal threads with the histories of domestic labor, extraction economies, and the performance of family in theater, film, and everyday life. Lines reverberate between worldliness and devotion, between Peter Pan and Close Encounters, between Paul Robeson and Maude Adams, between leaps of faith and passionate alliances, between everyday tragedy and imaginative social possibility. As Willis writes in her afterword to the book, "The repeated unmaking and remaking of America, as a concept and as an ongoing textual project, is not impossible. It is happening all the time."

Liontaming in America

New Directions

Elizabeth Willis's new collection is a stunning collision of the pastoral tradition with the politics of the post-industrial age. These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world―mutability, desire, and the flowering of things―they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Wesleyan University Press

Winner of the Laurence L. & Thomas Winship / PEN New England Award (2012)Address draws us into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation; they take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees—beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully transformed. If a poem can serve as a kind of astrolabe, measuring distances both cosmic and immediate, temporal and physical, it does so by imaginative, nonlinear means. Here, past and present engage in acts of mutual interrogation and critique, and within this dynamic Willis’s poetry is at once complexly authoritative and searching: “so begins our legislation.” Check for the online reader’s companion at http://address.site.wesleyan.edu.

Address (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Winner of the Laurence L. &amp; Thomas Winship / PEN New England Award (2012) Address draws us into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation; they take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees―beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully transformed. If a poem can serve as a kind of astrolabe, measuring distances both cosmic and immediate, temporal and physical, it does so by imaginative, nonlinear means. Here, past and present engage in acts of mutual interrogation and critique, and within this dynamic Willis's poetry is at once complexly authoritative and searching: "so begins our legislation." Check for the online reader's companion at http://address.site.wesleyan.edu.

Poetry. "The poems in SECOND LAW are terse, precise, ecstatic and luminous. White letters serve as lures and traces through gaps of ordered scientific discourse the rapture of the poet's will remains captive and rejoicing. In these linked fragmentary linguistic structures Elizabeth Willis enters Bunyan's emblematic river another time; singing"--Susan Howe.

Second Law

Avenue B

Now that the art of motion pictures has matured into its second century, Conjunctions has commissioned a diverse group of writers to respond--in poetry, fiction, and multi-genre works--to the countless cultural, historical, psychological and theatrical aspects of the seductive flickering medium we watch in the dark. Cinema Lingua pays creative homage to the symbiosis between filmmaking and the written word. Our authors explore, rewrite and celebrate all avenues of film, from its narrative plots to visual storytelling, from character to mood, from lighting to suspense. Each contributor presents defining visions of the movies and focuses the lens of writing on one of our liveliest modern art forms, from mainstream Hollywood to the most exotic corners of the experimental and avant garde. A movie theater of the mind, Cinema Lingua's contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, who explores the troubled relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and his leading ladies, Peter Straub writing on film noir, Peter Gizzi, who offers a multi-genre poem on silent film, Frederic Tuten, whose Never Never Land Near Marienbad is based on the Alain Resnais film, as well as works by Peter Hutton, Elizabeth Willis, Robert Coover, William H. Gass, Tan Lin, Kent Jones, Joshua Furst and many others.

Conjunctions: 42, Cinema Lingua

YAU, John

Lin, Tan

COOVER, Robert

Gizzi, Peter

Jones, Kent

Gass, William

Jarnot, Lisa

Hutton, Peter

OATES,JOYCE CAROL

Literary

Bard College

19th century Melbourne was a growing metropolis of dazzling change brought about by new wealth. The Royal Exhibition Building, an icon of Victorian architecture, was the first to win World Heritage listing.

The Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne: A Guide

Arts & Photography

Architecture

Museum Victoria

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.

Alive: New and Selected Poems (NYRB Poets)

NYRB Poets

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Willis, Elizabeth. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Willis, Elizabeth

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Willis, Elizabeth. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Human Abstract (THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES)

Liontaming in America

Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Address (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Address (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Second Law

Conjunctions: 42, Cinema Lingua

The Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne: A Guide

Alive: New and Selected Poems (NYRB Poets)