Self and Simulacra

**2002 PEN Center USA West Literary Award in Poetry Finalist** **2001 Beatrice Hawley Award** “. . .a highly intelligent and literate poetry….While the I exists because it desires (I want therefore I am), the self is multiple and unstable, and Waldner takes joy in this mutability through a syntax as fluid as self….The poems…radicalize syntax through simultaneous rather than layered alternatives, indicating the multiplicity inherent in perspective…” —*Arts & Letters* “An ornately strange, elegant investigation of our begotten and made selves. Methods and language archaic and contemporary, botanical and anatomical, inflorescent, cotyledonal—with hair and members. Lady bugs for consolation. A brave new unmalicious mind.” —C. D. Wright “Liz Waldner is a poet of high wit, high intelligence, and great musical rigor—she may be our Postmodern Metaphysical poet plummeting deeper and deeper with each book into the questions of self, sexuality, and knowing. These poems are so intoxicated with their making that one gets the sense of the sheer pleasure of composition—‘there is no greater pleasure than pleasure in writing.’ And reading.” —Gillian Conoley