Order Lying In from Milkweed Editions, April 2023
A devastating, vulnerable collection tracing high-risk pregnancy and new motherhood amid grief.
“All my life all I’ve wanted was to be myself / and someone else,” writes Elizabeth Metzger. From the shadowy perspective of confinement, where the presence of death unsettles all outcomes, these poems examine an expansion and fracturing of the self—into motherhood as well as childhood, into past selves and future unknowns. The child becomes parent, the parent becomes child, the child arrives but in doing so is lost. New loss haunts new life, and life becomes “one or two lives.” The door is more valuable than the prize behind it.
With ambivalence as well as deep feeling, Metzger wonders how a single body can be expected to hold both immense joy and immense mourning, profound longing and creeping numbness, when one so often overtakes the other. She plunges into the darkness inside—of the gloomy room, the inner body, the afterlife and the pre-language mind—and sends back “a searchlight across the underworld,” Eurydice in search of herself.
Aching and contemplative, Lying In is an exquisite portrait of an in-between time—and of the person who emerges on the other side. “Isn’t it obvious how we’ve changed?”
Order Below:
Milkweed: https://milkweed.org/book/lying-in
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/lying-in-poems-elizabeth-metzger/18592529?ean=9781639550104
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lying-in-elizabeth-metzger/1141816640?ean=9781639550104
Books-a-Million: https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Lying/Elizabeth-Metzger/9781639550104?id=8558374608597
LYING IN EVENTS and BOOK TOUR
2/18 @ 7:00pm PT: Beyond Baroque (Venice, CA)
Julia Guez book launch of “The Certain Body
Diana Khoi Nguyen, Morgan Parker, James Fujinami Moore
3/9 AWP Signing @12 noon Milkweed Editions (Seattle, WA)
3/9 AWP Signing @3pm Tupelo Press (Seatlle, WA)
3/9 AWP Milkweed Event at Optimist Brewing 6-9pm (Seattle, WA)
3/9 AWP Situated Sublimities Offsite Reading at Beneath the Streets @7:30pm (Seattle, WA)
John James, J.Mae Barizo, Meghan Maguire Dahn, Austen Leah Rose, Toby Altman, Patrick James Errington, Kelly Weber
3/10: AWP Tupelo Offsite Footprint at Wine Tap @7pm (Seattle, WA)
4/1 at 7pm CDT Woodland Pattern
Collaboration with musician Lia Kohl
4/13 @ 7:00pm PST: Skylight Books (Los Angeles, CA)
Austen Leah Rose and Julia Anna Morrison
4/28 @ 6:00PM PST: Chevalier’s Books (Los Angeles, CA)
Vandana Khanna and Catherine Pond
5/3 @ 7:00pm PST: Green Apple Books (San Francisco, CA)
Brain Tierney and Ryann Stevenson
5/12 : Black Spring Books (New York, NY)
Carlie Hoffman, Timothy Donnelly, Ricardo Maldonado
5/18 @ 7:00 PM EST: Greenlight Bookstore, Fort Greene (New York, NY)
Katie Peterson and Dorothea Lasky
5/24 @7:00 PM PST: Stories Books and Cafe (Los Angeles, CA)
Amanda Gunn and Alexandria Hall
PAST NEWS:
Bed has won the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Bibbins and was published by Tupelo in November 2021!
Watch a video recording of “Not Spring” from The Spirit Papers at Ours Poetica
The Spirit Papers has won the 2016 Juniper Prize in Poetry and was released in January 2017 by University of Massachusetts Press.
Order from University of Massachusetts or Amazon
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death was published in April 2017 by Horsethief Books.
elizabeth.metzger1@gmail.com
Find me on Twitter @anelizabeth2
Find me on Twitter @nobodytoo2