'Lying In' by Elizabeth Metzger ’15 Out Now from Milkweed Editions

By
Jessie Shohfi
April 25, 2023

Lying In, a new book of poems from alumna Elizabeth Metzger ’15, is out now from Milkweed Editions. 

Metzger’s second full-length collection, Lying-In is the portrait of a liminal space and time, an examination of great joy alongside a great sorrow, and of the self that emerges in the aftermath.

Lying In has received substantial praise already, including from Associate Professor and Head of Poetry Dorothea Lasky, who said, “Elizabeth Metzger’s Lying In is a brave book about what enormous things you will do for those you love. Told from the perspective of bedrest, the book uncovers and examines the pain and possibility we all hold within us while lying still. Within this book, poetry lies itself on its own spacious bed, telling us all about the very strangeness of being and what great energy it takes to bother to exist at all. Metzger writes, ‘Child I bend around you / like a boat. / If you live / do not blame the wave.’ Within these lines, we are all the children of poetry, left there wondering if someone will save us. This book will save us.”

In an interview with Poets & Writers, Metzger revealed that it took her about six years to write the collection. She said, “The most obvious challenge was bedrest itself: I was often either too sick or too afraid to recognize or accept the risk of beginning a poem. While my first pregnancy involved a placental abruption and my second involved hyperemesis gravidarum, in both cases I felt my body as an obstacle to creativity…Entering the realm of the self, let alone a poem, seemed impossible. I had to fake it at first, go through my own former motions, even mourn and pine for some old self before finally a new voice woke me up from a rare postpartum sleep—it became the poem ‘Won Exit’—like a jealous sibling and said, Do you still want me? Once I said yes, it turned out the voice was mine.”

Metzger will appear in conversation with Lasky on May 18, 2023 at Greenlight Bookstore to celebrate the launch of the collection. Registration for the event is open now, and the book is available for purchase here

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed.