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"A devastating, vulnerable collection tracing high-risk pregnancy and new motherhood amid grief"--
List of contents
1
Lying In . 3
Won Exit . 9
First Wound Kept Open . 10
We Are Often in Danger of Departing . 12
You’ve Been on Earth So Long Already . 13
Exaggerated Honey . 15
Picture of the Floating World . 17
Patient Mentality . 19
Not My Child . 20
The Witching Hour . 22
Moses, New York . 25
2
Welcome . 29
The Whole Way . 30
With Wayward Motion . 31
Early Rising . 34
Last of Kin . 36
First Anniversary . 37
Ultrasound . 39
A Birth Interrupted On and Off by the World . 40
Guest House . 41
For My Mother Wanting Children . 42
Inmate of Happiness . 43
Mid-Supper . 45
Godface . 49
The Impossibility of Crows . 50
Wrong Distance . 52
The End That Followed . 54
Mercy Later . 56
Verisimilitude . 57
Almost One . 58
So I Finally Slept . 59
The Flat Chapel . 61
One More Day . 62
Every Child Alone . 64
4
As Long As They Want . 69
The God Incentive . 70
Sex Dream . 71
Marriage . 72
Roach . 73
On a Clear Night . 75
Mother Nothing . 76
Daughter as Myself . 79
What Are the Chances . 80
Desire . 82
Notes . 83
Acknowledgments . 85
About the author
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.
Summary
A devastating, vulnerable collection tracing high-risk pregnancy and new motherhood amid grief.
“All my life all I’ve 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 self—into 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 inside—of the gloomy room, the inner body, the afterlife and the pre-language mind—and 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 time—and of the person who emerges on the other side. “Isn’t it obvious how we’ve changed?”
Foreword
- Digital galley campaign, with outreach targeted at major, poetry, feminist and regional media, as well as booksellers and librarians; digital galley available for download on Edelweiss
- Media outreach positioning
the collection as an accessible, vulnerable, and intimate account of motherhood
in the twenty-first century - Advertising with the
Academy of American Poets - Special promotion to
seed sales around Mother’s Day - Newsletter promotion
via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30K contacts - Academic outreach to
seed book in MFA, poetry, literature, and women’s studies courses - Major launch in Los
Angeles
