Bøker av Elizabeth Willis

"To disrupt the relationship of predator and prey, to reshape one's relation to power, is to renovate the lived and living world," Elizabeth Willis writes in her visionary work that delves deep into the ancient enchantments and disciplinary displays of the circus. Liontaming in America investigates the utopian aspirations fleetingly enacted in the polyamorous life of a nineteenth-century Mormon community, interweaving archival and personal threads with the histories of domestic labor, extraction economies, and the performance of family in theater, film, and everyday life.Lines reverberate between worldliness and devotion, between Peter Pan and Close Encounters, between Paul Robeson and Maude Adams, between leaps of faith and passionate alliances, between everyday tragedy and imaginative social possibility. As Willis writes in her afterword to the book, "The repeated unmaking and remaking of America, as a concept and as an ongoing textual project, is not impossible. It is happening all the time."

Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in PoetryAmerican poet Elizabeth Willis has written an electrifying body of work spanning more than twenty years. With a wild and inquisitive lyricism, Willis—“one of the most outstanding poets of her generation” (Susan Howe)—draws us into intricate patterns of thought and feeling. The intimate and civic address of these poems is laced with subterranean affinities among painters, botanists, politicians, witches and agitators. Coursing through this work is the clarity and resistance of a world that asks the poem to rise to this, to speak its fury.

A bold poetic intervention into the pastoral tradition.