Lying In: Poems

(Paperback)

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A devastating, vulnerable collection tracing high-risk pregnancy and new motherhood amid grief.

All my life all Ive 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 selfinto 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 insideof the gloomy room, the inner body, the afterlife and the pre-language mindand 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 timeand of the person who emerges on the other side. Isnt it obvious how weve changed

Reviews

Praise for Lying In

This book is profound in the way it portrays love, loss, numbness and longing. the overall arc of this amazing collection, ranging from poignance to the introspective, this body of work is a thoughtful offering that stays with the reader. I celebrate its unique relationship with language, its fine approach to storytelling, its ageless themes, cohesiveness, and how insightfully it delved into complex emotions and ideas, with sensitivity and depth. Lying In is one book to return to as often as one permits the longing for words that are devastatingly beautiful in their communication of experiences that leaves behind it, pools of light we never know how thirsty we are for.Chris Margolin, The Poetry Question

Elizabeth MetzgersLying Inis a book orbiting sacrifice, orbiting the way(s) one generation gives lifethen gives wayto the next. She writes, In wildfire ash / I teach our son the alphabet. A finger writes letters in the dust of dead treeswhat is missing, what is gone, becomes language, literally becomes the shapes from which language is formed. Later, Metzger writes, I brought a weather with me // but it was not expectable / that he would stay this long, and I tremble. Really, there is something of Dickinsons elemental shudder in Metzgers lyric; I feel it in that deep molten core of me only real art can touch. What vision can be given / What visible is trueLying Inis brilliant, no bullshit. Elizabeth Metzger has become one of my favorite living poets.Kaveh Akbar

Elizabeth MetzgersLying Inis a brave book about what enormous things you will do for those you love. Told from the perspective of bedrest, the book uncovers and examines the pain and possibility we all hold within us while lying still. Within this book, poetry lies itself on its own spacious bed, telling us all about the very strangeness of being and what great energy it takes to bother to exist at all. Metzger writes, Child I bend around you / like a boat. / If you live / do not blame the wave. Within these lines, we are all the children of poetry, left there wondering if someone will save us. This book will save us.Dorothea Lasky

What an intimate, intense book of poems Elizabeth Metzger has written! Fueled by the honest combination of ardor and rage at the heart of motherhood,Lying Inis full of arias, sung to the self and others, persistent and daring. These are occasioned by the actual confinement of the title (two difficult pregnancies), but that literal confinement mirrors a (potentially) universal conditionthat of any life willing to grieve the real limits of our bewildering world, any reader willing to acknowledge the bewildering intensityof the voluntary nature of staying alive. It is the mystery of the human will in continuing resistance that this book explores, as fragile as that sometimes seems. To do this, Metzger must be focused as a sniper, lying in wait to catch in language a truth that lies just past what can be saidand she is.Katie Peterson

Praise for Bed

A bed of rosesor indeed, no bed of roses. Elizabeth Metzgers poems act as both repositories and engines of mystery, of secrets other secrets / have rubbed away, yet their mysteriousness never feels coy. Theres a difference between hiding information and asserting control over how its revealed. I stayed off-center, she writes, and to me this has always seemed like one of the better places from which to view things, but hers is furthermore a poetry that recognizes, as Gertrude Stein put it, there is no use in a center. Among Metzgers many gifts is her ability to describe complicated positions simply, facing down the conundrums of language and perspective to devastating effect: The children left me. / You say they came.Mark Bibbins, Judges Citation

Praise for The Spirit Papers

The Spirit Papersis a haunted book. Elizabeth Metzgers striking poems, limber and torqued, conjure phantom presences and palpable absences, in which the dreamed-of imagines the dreamer: You dream of me writing / your name on paper / adding in pencil a live. Metzger probes enigmas of kinship, often filial, and navigates a restless sense of estrangement, poignantly fixed on the halo of whats un-begun. The Spirit Papers, finally, and successfully, builds a worlda world built as much out of whats found, as out of what resists being found.James Haug
A kettle whistles for nobody home. / And the wishes you never/and the others you will says whats in the heart of The Spirit Papers. In these intimately naked poems love, and the anticipation of loves inevitable losses, lets us see into the endless facets our imaginations contrive to if not console us, to keep us going. The book gives us the encouragement we get from feeling we are in this together and from whats unbegun were given some hope, maybe to conjure a kinder us.Precision, quiet daring, a decision to not waste a word, assigns a ceremonial aspect to poems whose lines ask us to take with them the time it takes to let the spirit in.Dara Wier

Elizabeth Metzgers intelligence and originality are spiritual, earthy, brave.Especially in poems addressing a very ill young friend, Metzger expresses a wild courage that seems instinctive. Her poems are braided with a love for this world that brings to mind Dickinson.Jean Valentine

There is often ravishing verbal abandon in these poems: the halo of whats un-begun about him. They join this to a formidable, discriminating narrative intelligence: If hes my first to go I will thank nobody for everything. Epigrams pierce, new-minted: What light is to the eyeless / we are to the lonesome. What unifies these poems They are carefully composed messages stuffed in a bottle thrown from a plague ship.Frank Bidart

Ive rarely come across a first book as unconditional, as exquisite, as captivating as this one is.Lucie Brock-Briodo

These poems are unforgettable in their elegant reach past dissolution, their intimation that there is a better heaven to be made than a deitys, that there is a dream and the dream is this exquisite yet hard-faceted grieving initiatory poetry, first-responding against death.Carol Muske-Dukes

This book is a book about heaven. Its about the collection of human connections and love that make a heaven. In that case,The Spirit Papersis its own little immaculate heaven.Ploughshares

Author Bio

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In, as well as and The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poem-a-Day. Her essays have been published in Boston Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, PN Review, and Literary Hub, among others. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and she lives in California.