Elizabeth Willis Read Bio Collapse
Elizabeth Willis is the author of the poetry collections Alive: New and Selected Poems (2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Address (2011), recipient of the Laurence L. & Thomas Winship/PEN New England Award; Meteoric Flowers (2006); Turneresque (2003); The Human Abstract (1995), a National Poetry Series selection; and Second Law (1993). She is also the editor of Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (2008). Her poetry has been translated into French, Dutch, Polish, and Slovak.
# 136
I am thinking about the spiral of W.E.B. Du Bois’s data portraits, the body as a body of facts, the touch of economics on the skin. / I’m thinking of the landscapes of extractable wealth, their labyrinths, their underworlds. / I’m thinking of Paul Robeson playing a miner onscreen, the ways he enacted or mirrored forms of burial and displacement. I’m thinking about the premiere he refused to attend. / Histories rewired, unrepaired.