Dark Would

A philosophical, tough, and often funny inquiry into twenty-first-century selfhood, Liz Waldner's new collection of poems takes shape in the shadow of Dante's "dark wood."Dark Would (the missing person)is quirky. It's audaciously American, out of the Dickinson house. Waldner uses short, quick syntactical units that swerve rather than build up an architecture of ideas through sequential juxtaposition. She also has, like Dickinson, a canny, carnal, specifying diction. Her poems are sonorous, sly, and sexy. They are political in their address of gender through reference to pop songs, poems, and analyses of personal experiences. The resulting wry permutations of will and desire alternately leaf and hew an American "dark wood." The pages and paths turn to and through the kinds of lostness and foundness to which rootlessness gives rise.

Liz Waldner is the award-winning author of several books of poetry, including Homing Devices; Self and Simulacra, winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award; A Point Is That Which Has No Part, winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Iowa Poetry Prize; and Etym(bi)ology (forthcoming). She lives in Seattle.