Address

by Elizabeth Willis

New poems from an original and challenging American voice

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 "so begins our legislation."

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Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Hardcover

First published March 3, 2011

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

[Max Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An alright collection of poems. Willis is certainly at her best when she is political- Her poem about Katherine Harris, and anything about Witches, were the highlights of the book for me. But not every poem felt as accomplished, especially the ones that weren't so distinctly conceptual. Parts of the book wandered into aimlessness a bit, but eventually it always came back to something powerful and memorable. Worth checking out for poetry fans, but probably not one that will be at the top of your list. A handful of poems are worth coming back to again and again.

[Stephen Kiernan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Challenging, interesting poems. These are not lyrics, nor narratives, nor confessions. These poems, for most part, are lists.

There is sometimes an accumulating effect that is unexpected, yet associative and connected, as if a poem is one long simile. A few times the leaps occur without that connective tissue, and the poem is distancing, surreal, and too opaque for my taste

The best are the political poems, which sing and shout and surprise. I'd love to see a book of these by this poet.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Different strains in this book -- I find the political ones generally well-done and intriguing, for example "You've Lost Your Card". Then there are the strange, tenuous lyric ones, some of which are wonderfully elusive, inverting, like this beginning of "In Strength Sweetness":

"in the wind / an inky air
in the air / finchness
in the ink / a stone"

which goes on in that vein, avoiding expectation.

[H · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to read every poem out loud, and did, and everyone else on the couch was happy too.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this to prep interviewing Cathy Wagner. I truly can't remember why, but I do remember the bizarre acoustics of Paley Library.

[S · Rating 2 out of 5]

Other than the ones about the witches, which were kinda obvious, the other ones were un-intuitable with the exception of "In Strength Sweetness" which had some nice chaismatic do-see-doing going on.