Poetry. The poems in Liz Waldner’s HER FAITHFULNESS surprise and sustain. The world they know is daily harmed and harming, and they summon resources against its meanness: the natural world where sight of an indigo bunting or blue lizard presents the kingdom of heaven, a fragment of song or local speech carrying memory and feeling. All of the themes and inventiveness of Waldner’s eight earlier books are part of HER FAITHFULNESS, here condensed to their essence in poems wild and smart and joyful and wise near the end of their journey: After a long time, I came to love’s house / where I was invited to stay.
These playful meditations on sex, passion and, above all, the desire for a home, belie the intensity animating them. When Waldner names the ‘god’ she wants ‘she, ’ it’s easy to overlook the erased option–‘goddess’–that implies the co-existence of a male god. Waldner’s position is clear: the only singular god is she. And she, the only ‘Mercy’ worth wanting, is the ‘good.’ HER FAITHFULNESS, the story of Waldner’s peripatetic life, rewards a reading, to say nothing of her readers, faithful to the end.–Tyrone Williams
The difference between looking anywhere you can and looking anywhere you want reasons the weather of these exquisite poems, inside which malady, melody, severity, doubt, and pleasure approach and pass to be claimed by a voice too beautiful to ever stop listening for. Liz Waldner may be here to show us how joy made sad gets to keep being joy, how to be beheld by meanness and not be it. This is the work of a vital, profuse mind undeniably at home in poetry.–Kathleen Peirce
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.–Gillian Conoley
