REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS
Rain Taxi
interview with Tiffany Troy, Winter 2023/2024
Poets & Writers
10 Questions for Elizabeth Metzger
“These introspective lyrics consider the physical and psychic demands of motherhood and other forms of human relationship. Opening with a meditation on a difficult pregnancy—including a period of forced bed rest—the collection pushes back on the idea that gestation and birth are purely joyful experiences”
Harriet, Poetry Foundation
Christopher Spaide reviews Lying In
“Metzger reimagines bed rest as everything from quarantine to a queenly throne, her tones ranging from uncensored envy [. . .] With word-perfect precision, Metzger gives voice to postpartum paradoxes.”
McSweeney’s Short Conversations with Poets
Jesse Nathan with Elizabeth Metzger
“Elizabeth Metzger writes a taut, searing line. Compression isn’t the right word, because these are capacious poems, phrases that hold and open up worlds—of feeling, of experience, of memory mixed with a living moment. Efficient might be a more accurate description—or impeccable.”
Buzzfeed Books
Laura Sackton reviews Lying In
“In her second full-length collection, Metzger explores pregnancy, motherhood, grief, and bodily transformation. There’s a sparse formality to these poems, with their elegant imagery and philosophical musings, but they are also deeply human and grounded in the body. Blurring the boundaries between past and future, Metzger writes about the strangeness and wonder of creating new life and the contradictions inherent in being a new parent[. . .] This is a moving, vulnerable book and a welcome addition to the growing canon of complicated literature about motherhood.”
The Poetry Question
Chris Margolian reviews Lying In
“This book is profound in the way it portrays love, loss, numbness and longing. … the overall arc of this amazing collection, ranging from poignance to the introspective, this body of work is a thoughtful offering that stays with the reader. I celebrate its unique relationship with language, it's fine approach to storytelling, its ageless themes, cohesiveness, and how insightfully it delved into complex emotions and ideas, with sensitivity and depth. Lying In is one book to return to as often as one permits the longing for words that are devastatingly beautiful in their communication of experiences that leaves behind it, pools of light we never know how thirsty we are for.”
Write or Die Magazine
round up
Books of Brilliance
round up
Los Angeles Review
Tiffany Troy interviews Elizabeth Metzger
Ploughshares Blog
Matthew Lippman reviews The Spirit Papers
Huffington Post
Carol Muske-Dukes reviews The Spirit Papers
Boston Review
Three poems from The Spirit Papers on the list of BR's 25 most-read poems of 2016
Frontier Poetry
On Max Ritvo’s Final Voicemails
BOMB Magazine
The Porous Fabric Between Life and Death: Elizabeth Metzger interviews Sarah Ruhl
The Rumpus
Mini-Interview Project #85: Elizabeth Metzger
The Adroit Journal
Conversations with Contributors: Eileen Huang interviews Elizabeth Metzger