ELIZABETH WILLIS is the author of four previous books including Meteoric Flowers, Turneresque, and The Human Abstract. She is Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University.
"Elizabeth Willis's language in Address is both brilliantly chatty
and essentially nondiscursive. It proceeds by anaphora and listing,
by surprise and non sequitur, makes you laugh out loud at the
deftness of its wit, then dangles you over an emotive abyss, then
stops you in your tracks before suggestive blankness."--Richard
Silberg, Poetry Flash
"In the engagement with current poetic record and its heresies,
Address arrives at an environment fraught with an argument it
creates by also refuting it. It feels inevitable that Address ends
with the possibility of going out of ourselves and addresses by
harnessing materials from our discontinuities into an
opening."--Fancisco "Kokoy" Guevara, Jacket2
"The reader must stay with Willis all the way to grasp her often
unexpected associations, her wide-ranging artistic and political
references, and her insistence that the reader has something of
acivic duty to engage in the discussion. It's worth the
trip."--Carol Bere, Women's Review of Books
"How Willis situates her poems in an experimental tradition is
useful for thinking through the formal parallels and divergences
between queer time and the temporal orientations of experimental
poetics."--Davy Knittle, Jacket2
"Willis's address is unmistakable: these are poems that 'tell you
what you've done.'"--Publishers Weekly
"The poems assay the fraught American climate--addressing the deep
injustices and missed communications that mark our contemporary
social moment. Willis has the finest ear for the lyric amongst her
generation. (T)he intense beauty of the work is an unblinking
testament to the poet's sense that the stakes for language are
becoming impossibly high. Address shows us that music, too, can
have an undeniable ferocity."--Richard Deming, Boston Review
"Address is mischievous enough to be pleasurable, dangerous enough
to keep you alert, and just strange enough to provide the good
company you didn't know you were missing until it arrived to greet
you."--Jeanne Marie Beaumont, citation, PEN New England Award
"Elizabeth Willis's language in Address is both brilliantly chatty
and essentially nondiscursive. It proceeds by anaphora and listing,
by surprise and non sequitur, makes you laugh out loud at the
deftness of its wit, then dangles you over an emotive abyss, then
stops you in your tracks before suggestive blankness."--Richard
Silberg, Poetry Flash
"Humorous, political, engaged, and deeply resonant--at the end
you'll start again."--Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Brooklyn Rail
"Willis newly revives the list/litany form, and that works to the
reader's delight. Edged flowers or berries in transparent wax: what
the words are like. So we have the forest, along with a quite
ruined New England/America. And if one is a traditional Witch, does
or doesn't it help? . . . Keeper of the 'black poppy, '
poetry."--Alice Notley, author of Grave of Light: New and Selected
Poems, 1970-2005
"How does the poem address both self and world? How does it address
at once the light and the dark of things as they are? And from what
site--or address--can it possibly speak in the profoundly unstable
currents of our time? Such are among the eternal issues Elizabeth
Willis movingly explores here by means of an unflinching 'devotion
/ to the ungoverned, ' that is, by means of the poetic imagination
itself.""--Michael Palmer, author of The Lion Bridge
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