Wave House

Author: Elizabeth Arnold

Publisher: Flood Editions (2023)

"Elizabeth Arnold's poems are structures for our times: built to move and to hold. Within them surge the elemental forces, the earth's deep patterns and the human-driven, breakneck hurts—and the poet's own migratory mind, coming honestly to terms with her restless and embattled life. In Wave House, her sixth book, she emerges as one of our great American contemporaries. Niedecker, Oppen, and Pound are Arnold's forebears, though she sloughs away nativist habits, 'unhindered by belief, / utterly available.' If, within the far-flung geographies visited by her poems, you are often reminded of her birth-state, Florida, that is not because her goal is return. Elegy belongs to the Wanderer's exile, as spoken in her thrilling translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem. Arnold's aim is to be here: 'in the open-air room / at the top of the house // where I've been working,' to 'see more sharply' into the movements of species beside her. So she brings that life to the reader, thriving in the vital moment of each poem."

—Jenny Mueller