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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 06/03/2002
ISBN: 9780820323916
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.36lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.64w x 0.37d

Review Citations: PW Notes and Reprints 06/17/2002 pg. 61
Foreword 07/01/2002 pg. 66
Publishers Weekly 06/17/2002