Liontaming in America

by Elizabeth Willis

A spiraling, staggering new collection of historical and mythic reinvention (and Elizabeth Willis’s first book with New Directions)


“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.”

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

Published September 24, 2024

About the author

Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book is Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015). Her other books of poetry include Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), recipient of the PEN New England / L. L. Winship Prize for Poetry; Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan University Press, 2006); Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003); The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995); and Second Law (Avenue B, 1993). She also writes about contemporary poetry and has edited a volume of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (University of Iowa Press, 2008). A recent Guggenheim fellow, she has held residencies at Brown University, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the Centre International de Poésie, Marseille, and has been a visiting poet at University of Denver, Naropa University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From 1998-2002 she was Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Mills College. Since 2002 she has taught at Wesleyan University, where she is Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing.

Reviews

[Ada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quina cosa estranya: sobre el mormonisme, les dones mormones, la frontera, els mites fundacionals, els circs i els lleons, l'arxiu, l'arxiu, l'arxiu, i el poema. Hi ha moltes coses que no he entès. M'ha encantat.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a family history, western history, women’s history & place in this world.

Unfortunately, I am not a great writer & certainly no poet. But I recognize it & I was immediately drawn to her words. Magnificently delivered, this book will dance in my mind for a long time as the threads she unspooled find their way into a beautiful cloth I will continue to search for new connections.

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]]

'Jails were made to last
Poetry, the true fiction, was meant to take them down.'

OKAY, yep, I need this.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A refreshing, anti-poetic, exhausting conversation about American cultural dominion in mixed metaphor collage.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

How have we become what we are? And where are we headed?

A delightful if not always comforting journey from prehistory into the future. What is ahead for us?

Before we can go there, though, we need to step back. Where do we Americans come from? And what have we become?

Is nature and nurture the supreme question? Or nature and nation?

Can a nation be born without colonies, without land-theft and forced labor, indeed, colonization with all manner of hierarchy, subjugation, and what the better angels of our nature have led us to question?

Clearly Elizabeth Willis, the author of this rich and descriptive collection of prose poems, has wrestled long and hard with these questions. She uses the 19th century history of the circus (circopedia.org tells me that, while it may have had European origins, the U.S. is where the specific form of entertainment we think of, namely, the traveling circus [with its wild animals and odd humans] developed), her own family genealogy, and the myths of a uniquely American religion (the LDS Church, aka Mormonism) to frame the fascinating itinerary.

Did you realize that in the olden days Mormons not only practiced polygamy but also polyandry? Ms. Willis claims that one of her ancestors was married to more than one man, and that this was not out of the one-time norm.

And what of it? Don’t we realize all sorts of social rules are merely mores, fashionable one decade, passè the next?

The trajectory appears likely to continue. Just as European colonizers needed land expanded Westward towards the Pacific, the ultra-rich today make plans to colonize the moon, Mars…, what next?

Yet all the world’s a stage…, or a museum, through which Ellis gives us a delightful ekphrastic tour blending history and art with phrase and fable. There’s always a backstage, and at times someone, human or canine, to pull the curtain aside and reveal that what we thought was real was an image on a screen, a play on the stage, or a tale about a flying boy and his never never land told by an idiot….

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a post Mormon and current female Iowan, this book resonated with me in deep ways. It came to my attention through happenstance, my teenager asked to spend a day in Iowa City to see a friend. That same day Elizabeth Willis was speaking at the Book Festival, where she read from the book- I heard her connect Peter Pan to temple clothing. It was a shock to my brain, so obvious and veiled. The best way poetry shows up. The concepts covered and connections made in this book were at the same time soothing and provoking. I don’t know how it would read for a stranger to Mormonism. It was a lingering bar in my prison of belief disintegrating, to great relief. To have someone say things that aren’t said; the role of a poet.

“The work of data portraits is the work of perspective. A crosscut interval, a working of art. To make what is already known a revelation, a formal pressure toward the work of consciousness. Rearrange what you know to make a new version of the visionary, the prophetic, the inspired, the revelatory. To see the tired facts anew.” p.280

[Jules Lings · Rating 5 out of 5]

this converted me into a poetry lover

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

While not the most consistent reader of poetry, I greatly enjoyed this work. All the more prescient to read at this moment in history, and I imagine I'll return to certain passages over and over.

"Perhaps the notion of directional movement, the plot by which histories appear to move, has become, in this moment, obsolete. What if it asks for the irrevocable destruction of conquest to be replaced by an immanent and irresistible mercy?"

[Jenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant, beautiful, and challenging. It is an epic read and worth sticking around for the last few chapters.

“Jails were made to last
Poetry, the true fiction, was meant to take them down”

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

from The End
3 'In the making of a poem, there is seldom a traceable path, only a kind of genealogy. You follow the leaf to the branch, the branch to the root [...] Words don't fall onto the page; they rise to meet its hushed expanse.'
5 'Poetry, the true fiction, was meant to take them down.'

from The First Division of Labor
6 'Salvage or slavery, gunpowder or corn, clothing or skin, trees or paragraphs, buffalo or boots, things I haven't thought of [...] Another sees the beginning as a tree radiant with unknowing, a being whose future has not yet been written.'

from Object Relations
24 'Anything he doesn't kill becomes part of his economy. Everything beyond his wordy mind becomes an object that can be taken or cast away.'

from Settler Time 1.0
31 'A region may be defined by its barriers to perception.'

from O Pioneer
35 'Asking what is old and what is new, what is native and what is invasive is one step into historical self-knowledge. Where does this begin? Where do I end? Where does the story lead? On what ground do our bodies meet?'

from Liontaming in America
42 'What moves in a straight line eventually disappears. What moves in a circle can live forever.'

from Evidence of Things Not Seen
80 'The presence of a witness brings events into language. After that, language itself is the event.'

from Both Roads
94 'A sentence shot with sleeplessness.'

from Matoaka & Mrs. Rolfe
113 'In the unrelenting algebra of conquest, women may be passed back and forth across imaginary lines; they may be translated from one system into another.'

from United Disorder
117 'What direction does your sentence move: you belonging to the land or the land belonging to you.'

from Correction
125 'Corrections are not equivalent to repair.'

from Uncategorical Feeling
136 'Her world was on fire, and fire is full of untranslatable words.'

from Never Say higher or Lower
146 'Form is not destiny. Not in plants. Nor other bodies. Corporal or governmental.'

from To Be Longing
172 'Bound by syntax, a word may yet contain boundlessness. Even god is a word. A gap in the text to show how distance can tear anything apart.'

from The Continuous Present
242 'Improvisation is not the domain of any avant-garde but the underlying reality of survival [...] Sometimes is a way of thinking about a moment in relation to infinity.'

from Huck | Crusoe | Friday | Jim
248 'The categorical use of one figure for cathexis and another for comic effect is among the most violent human gestures conducted by language outside the theater of war. The sentence, in love with progress, insists on running forward. When the motion of a plot is disturbed, temporal sequence may explode with the fragmentary truths of poetry or prophecy.'

Labyrinth
279 'A pattern seen from above has one kind of clarity.

From above there is a way out of the labyrinth.

On the ground you begin with a spider's thread.

On the ground you let go, or hold on, to follow a crooked line you can hardly see.

I don't have a bird's-eye view. I don't see the earthly flower from the sky.'

from Earthwork
283 'How far will the hinge of conjunction open.'

from Divine Comedies
284 'When energy is devoted to remembering one thing, it is also in the business of forgetting something else.'

from Future Imperfect
285 'A field that can think about what a feeling knows.'

from Anything Goes
293 'In the middle of a book is a gutter. The place where all the pages disappear. The edges are margins. The borders, where we live.'

from Here
303 'In Carl Dreyer's film Ordet, the mad prophet Johannes wanders in and out of scenes devoted to the stories of others. When he says, I build these houses but no one lives in them, the line is as devastating as a death in the family. Can anyone live in an invisible house? In a poem? In a book? Can you live there and still have your own story?

Narrative resists such a person. Johannes is always departing. His family thinks reading Kierkegaard drove him mad. They blow out the candles he lights; they don't say goodbye. He's living in a book they don't read.

There is no fixed liturgy in the church I came up in. During a service, the only word said in unison is Amen. It passes as quickly as a schoolbell. Everyone is altogether thinking about lunch. I want an Amen that means I read you or You've got it, and I back you all the way.'

from Author's Note
310 'Poetry is drawn to destabilizing established patterns of thought, to making visible the power to see otherwise. It seeks to bend the recursive loops of history toward futures other than those that this nation's governing bodies repeatedly instruct its citizens to accept.'
311 'Poetry is redirected silence as well as redirected sound, a domain whereby the world is shaped for a time by the music of language, even when its meanings are beyond the reach of words.'

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading Willis’s book, I’m personally convinced an official start to human history can be located by those who are persistent enough. Everyone knows what it is. Just look behind you, like a cone of light extending to the rear of you. And the world is just waiting for someone to identify it correctly. Or maybe this is what it feels like belonging to the Mormon church. Like there’s that time someone said it was that one guy doing something. And we all heard about it. And we were willing to forego the history that might have been attached to the man. But then there was another guy who did something like that. And no one’s sure whether the first guy they’d heard of did it, or the other guy. So then someone thought it would be good if they just put the two guys together. That’s where it all started. With conflated guy. And if someone were to say conflated guy is a fiction, it would mean he’s not true. Then you point them to another story about conflated guy. And that story sounds true enough.

I think that story, about conflated guy, shows a resemblance to the history of the Mormon church. Especially as Willis’s book gets into it. Like reading Liontaming in America from beginning to end, you’ll encounter first the role vagueness has to history. Then you’ll get into the history of the Mormon church, including the intertwined situationship of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. And, significantly, you’ll get stories about the women who were involved in that church. Hopefully, you’re reading Willis’s book because you’re curious about shifting the center of history to women’s choices, the consequences when people make historical choices, and how inadequately male-centered history has documented those choices when they were made by women. Willis’s book privileges these frayed edges of historical record. Liontaming is like visiting an archive, and you’ve been sifting through materials for the whole day, and now it’s everywhere on the table. Perhaps the history of Mormonism would prefer to be seen as the white woven undergarments that form to the man’s body. Too bad, says Willis’s poems.

It’s what happens if you’re going to write something that feels like the entirety of human history, and it’s going to include a bounty of detail, like when you were younger, and you’d read Umberto Eco’s revisionary takes on history, which made the 1990s feel like a more interesting decade, because suddenly the general culture was adapting to the fact that history is only a story, and it comes no where near the full story. But what Elizabeth Willis has to her advantage is poetry. Which can accommodate multitudes so much easier than the heavy hands of a novelist. It’s a proven fact that Umberto Eco’s hands would weigh heavy on his keyboard, because in his hands were the multiple timelines he would coerce into a single ending. A novel is only as good as its encapsulated conclusion. The works of Umberto Eco as laborious windows, many-paned windows, weighing the house down to its foundations.

And meanwhile, there’s Elizabeth Willis’s poems. Which are heavy constructions assuredly. No one wants an account of history that’s a paper palace. A paper palace is liable to just float up to the clouds. I like the history of Elizabeth Willis because it feels like the lacework architecture I see when I google “Moorish architecture Alhambra.” Which I did after reading Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. And that graceful complexity, that gives the impression of light solidity, and lets the airs of that region pass into the palace interiors, that’s what Willis’s book feels like when she’s relating moments in history that help explain how loose-fitting an entirety of history would be. Like describing the strangely mediated histories that form the Ronald Reagan character, and why that might exemplify the American man he was. Or perhaps the inexplicably downward arc of Paul Robeson’s career, punctuated in the end by a surprisingly wise cartoon image. Particular images, yes. But they contribute to this very American book, and what it means to be peculiar people experiencing them.

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN EXCELLENT BOOK, but difficult to describe. "This book is not a memoir," the first sentence states, so that point is settled, but even without that caveat few readers, I think, would assume it was one. The word "I" does not occur frequently, and most of the book's attention is devoted to people who lived in the 19th century.

The book is a poem, I think I can say, an American kind of epic poem that has some affinities with Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, parts of Louis Zukofsky's "A," and Charles Reznikoff's Testimony; that is, it includes a generous amount of the documentary, sometimes foregrounds its own processes, and often seems like a bold attempt to write a poem about the whole United States. (As in The Maximus Poems and Hart Crane's The Bridge, for instance, the woman we are used to calling Pocahontas appears.)

And while the book is not a memoir, Willis's own family background frames the project, for much it concerns the history of Mormonism and that movement's history in Utah. (And the end, unless I am jumping to conclusions, reflects the death of her parents in an automobile accident [p. 294].)

I don't know whether Willis would call herself a Mormon currently, and I would not call her a proselytizer or even an advocate, exactly, but she does provide a different kind of light on the church than we usually get. The section called "Boy" gives us a Joseph Smith who is neither a fast-talking charlatan nor a madman, but a made-in-America visionary. The church he founds breaks with precedent in a number of ways, especially in allowing polygamy, but in Willis's handling this is not patriarchy run amuck, but a willingness to reinvent the paradigm of the family in a way that might actually enable new kinds of communities, especially women's communities.

The book's title, we learn in a concluding "Author's Note," comes from "a 1926 essay in which Robert Walser compares a liontamer to a Mormon polygamist whose wives only appear to obey for the sake of public performance." The Mormon wives we meet in Willis's poem are a bit like the powerful medieval abbesses who, technically, had to acknowledge the authority of the church priesthood and hierarchy, but who nonetheless usually succeeded in managing what they wanted to manage, doing the work they wanted to do and creating communities that ran on their own terms.

Liontaming in America put me in mind not only of Olson, Zukofsky, and Reznikoff, but also of Harold Bloom's The American Religion, Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, Lucy Sante's Low Life, and Saidiya Hartman's Waywatd Lives, Beautiful Experiments by foregrounding people and movements a little more shadowy, a little more idiosyncratic, a little stranger, a little more obsessed and less assimilable than the people and movements you will meet in, say, a Ken Burns documentary. America, Willis convinced me, is not what we generally think it is.

[E Oxford · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book....it's like nothing I've ever read before and some of the lyrical turns of phrase are so perfect and slightly twisted.

However, you have to know what she's talking about deeply for any of this not sound like a fever dream.

The canon of culteral knowledge has to c0ver the U.S. history not many of us got, the Bible, Ronald Reagan's film career, obscure television shows, the Foundations of Mormonism...
And so much more.

In the end, it is just a terrible hash of a weird collection of artifacts, and less a commentary if domesticity and the making of America.

[Enry Ravaglini · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a banger, and it's quite accessible. Elizabeth Willis draws many highly specific, highly disparate threads (such as the founding of Mormonism, utopian TV show Lost In Space, Paul Robeson) to draw a portrait of America that is startlingly universal.

IMO can sit next to Leaves of Grass, The Bridge, John Brown's Body or whatever else you want to call the American Epic to be. Take your time and get lost in this!

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of this book is recognizable poetry, but much of it is prose aphorisms or musings covering the history of Mormonism and its intersections with feminism, race, Indigenous peoples, and the author's family. Some of the aphorisms were pithy, beautiful, arresting. Ultimately the book was so long and became somewhat tedious, but there are some true gems sprinkled throughout. Read slowly and savor.

[E. Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

great study on the presence of the author/curator in the archival artwork -- we must acknowledge our roles as retellers in order to then step away and get to the "truth" of the history -- what I mean is, until we acknowledge that history is shaped by our telling, we cannot get anywhere close to the "truth" -- and Willis knows this and works with this fact rather than resisting it

[Craw Thrice · Rating 5 out of 5]

The form of this book is perfect. We are left in a middle place, historically, poetically. A decisive balance between where something can be radicalised.

[Kelly Yarbrough · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fascinating format...epic and sweeping. Nice to savor.

[Curt Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A true masterpiece. A weaving of poetry, philosophy, art, gender, identity, history and social justice upon the greater American tapestry is breathtaking. Amazing.

[Addisyn ✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

hit a little too close to home at times. 10/10. crying