Elizabeth Willis

Elizabeth Willis Poems

Elizabeth Willis Biography

Elizabeth Willis was born in Bahrain and raised in the Midwest. She earned her BA from University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and her PhD from the Poetics Program at University of Buffalo. She is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), winner of the PEN New England/LL Winship Prize. Reviewing Alive for The Rumpus, Patrick James Dunagan remarked, “Willis expertly handles the particular moment in time and space of the poem’s encounter, presenting sculpted instance(s) of momentary recognition full of significant impact, charging the language with multi-layered depth.” She edited Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (2008). Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Howard Foundation fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony residency. She has taught at Brown University, Mills College, the University of Denver, and Wesleyan University, and she is currently teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lives in Iowa City.)

The Best Poem Of Elizabeth Willis

Ephemeral Stream

This is the way water
thinks about the desert.
The way the thought of water
gives you something
to stumble on. A ghost river.
A sentence trailing off
toward lower ground.
A finger pointing
at the rest of the show.

I wanted to read it.
I wanted to write a poem
and call it "Ephemeral Stream"
because you made of this
imaginary creek
a hole so deep
it looked like a green eye
taking in the storm,
a poem interrupted
by forgiveness.

It's not over yet.
A dream can spend
all night fighting off
the morning. Let me
start again. A stream
may be a branch or a beck,
a crick or kill or lick,
a syke, a runnel. It pours
through a corridor. The door
is open. The keys
are on the dashboard.

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