Address draws us into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation; they take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees-beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully transformed. If a poem can serve as a kind of astrolabe, measuring distances both cosmic and immediate, temporal and physical, it does so by imaginative, nonlinear means. Here, past and present engage in acts of mutual interrogation and critique, and within this dynamic Willis's poetry is at once complexly authoritative and searching: "so begins our legislation."
Check for the online reader's companion at http://address.site.wesleyan.edu.
""How Willis situates her poems in an experimental tradition is useful for thinking through the formal parallels and divergences between queer time and the temporal orientations of experimental poetics.""
Davy Knittle
""Humorous, political, engaged, and deeply resonant-at the end you'll start again.""
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
"Elizabeth Willis's language in Address is both brilliantly chatty and essentially nondiscursive. It proceeds by anaphora and listing, by surprise and non sequitur, makes you laugh out loud at the deftness of its wit, then dangles you over an emotive abyss, then stops you in your tracks before suggestive blankness."
