WednesdayNovember 13th
6:30pm
A spiraling, staggering new collection of historical and mythic reinvention. Recently longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.
“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.”
"Arcing between poetry, prophesy, and heresy, Willis, like Augusta Cobb, Walt Whitman, and others before her, has reimagined the nation in her visionary exploration of the ‘unrelenting algebra of conquest.’ Liontaming in America is a work of furious love." — Susan Howe
"America has a short history, passionately mixed up like a quilt. You can paw it as the allegorical archive it is, and Elizabeth Willis is a lot of a lion here, circling in the cage of this book throwing up intimate and random pieces of meat to terrify and intrigue us. Many speakers here are distantly related to her own family—they spout broken poem speeches in archaic or free style spelling, stepping out of their own dreams onto a land they did not know and might never understand what it is. Pearl S. Buck proposes maybe there isn’t any America at all. I think Elizabeth Willis is asking all the right questions. Her Liontaming is urgent reading as we stroll into the next awful season of the American dream, still wanting to know ‘Where do I end? . . . On what ground do our bodies meet?’" — Eileen Myles
Elizabeth Willis is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Liontaming in America, a hybrid work engaged with American belief and relationship structures, theatre, activism, and film, and Alive: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She also writes about the intersection of art and labor. Willis is the editor of the essay collection Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Great Guns, the editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (published by NYRB Poets), and the founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). Her newest poetry collection is Granny Cloud, also published by NYRB Poets. She lives and teaches in New York.
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