Tracking the dissolution of a marriage, a son's medical crisis, and the death of a father, The Going Is Forever is about holding on and letting go.
Forthcoming from Milkweed Editions on September 15, 2026, the third collection of poetry by Adjunct Assistant Professor Elizabeth Metzger '15 has been deemed "oracular, crystalline, and utterly original" by Maggie Millner, the author of Couplets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). In it, Metzger finds intimate portals of pleasure and pain in ordinary domestic ruptures. A degenerative disease spurs a creative awakening. A trip to the farmer's market invites questions of monogamy. An overgrown yard yields a crisis of faith. Unafraid, these poems peer into the small bright absences that exist between people, our closest loved ones included.
"Writing this book made me appreciate that there is never just one version of a life," said Metzger. "This collection has seen me through many artistic and personal transitions, and it means a lot to me to send it into the world."
"The Going Is Forever confirms what we already knew about Elizabeth Metzger—that she is an extraordinarily gifted expositor of life and death, of the self and its splinterings and stylings," said Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). "This book is Metzger's best work yet: tender and eerie, raging and insightful, relentlessly tacking toward truth."
Metzger is the author of Lying In (Milkweed, 2023), as well as The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review, TLS, and Poetry. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches poetry at 92NY and Columbia University.
The Going Is Forever is available now for preorder from the independent bookstores Books Are Magic and Skylight Books, as well as directly from Milkweed Editions.
