Self and Simulacra
Liz Waldner
2001 Beatrice Hawley Award
Engaging several languages, figures from the arts and sciences, and an array of philosophies in a conversation about insides, outsides, and the always changing places they engender and touch, Self and Simulacra is both ambitious and sweet. From airy lyric to ornate lament, couched in the Latinate language of Gray’s Botany or the lushness of Sir Thomas Browne, the book explores the motive force of longing in the growing of identity. How am I shaped by what ‘I’ am drawn to? Can I see beyond ‘I’? Rilke’s “What is within us surrounds us” twines the lines between individual and environment, lover and beloved, as the poems sow and reap problems of knowing sprung from ever-fresh, ever-idiosyncratic ground: the shadows and likenesses of a fluid self. Against the sad soil of mono-cropped, corporate culture, the book offers a weedily persistent and observant bloom: self and sexuality essayed across the definitions of gender (and other commodities). "…a highly intelligent and literate poetry….While the I exists because it desires (I want therefore I am), the self is multiple and unstable, and Waldner takes joy in this mutability through a syntax as fluid as self….The poems…radicalize syntax through simultaneous rather than layered alternatives, indicating the multiplicity inherent in perspective…" "An ornately strange, elegant investigation of our begotten and made selves. Methods and language archaic and
contemporary, botanical and anatomical, inflorescent, cotyledonal—with hair and members. Lady bugs for consolation. A
brave new unmalicious mind." "Liz Waldner is a poet of high wit, high intelligence, and great musical rigor—she may be our Postmodern Metaphysical poet
plummeting deeper and deeper with each book into the questions of self, sexuality, and knowing. These poems are so
intoxicated with their making that one gets the sense of the sheer pleasure of composition—‘there is no greater pleasure than
pleasure in writing.’ And reading."
2002 PEN Center USA West Literary Award in Poetry Finalist
—Arts & Letters
—C.D. Wright
—Gillian Conoley
about the author
Liz Waldner is the author of five books of poetry and several collaborations with musicians. Her newest collections are Saving the Appearances (ahsahta press, 2004), etym(bi)ology (Omnidawn Publishing, 2002) and Dark Would (the missing person), a University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series winner for 2002. Her work has received The Poetry Society of America's Robert M. Winner award; grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Lannan Foundation/Centrum and The Barbara Deming Money for Women Fund; and fellowships from the Djerassi Foundation, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell, among others.
