Free Online Talk · A Reading from The Going Is Forever with Poet Elizabeth Metzger
Monday, March 31, 2025
7pm ET (NYC time)
Free! RSVP with email at checkout
PLEASE NOTE: Video playback of free events is only available to Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanatomy.org.
This is a poetry reading from a book that confronts death, grief, and loss. From a dying part to a boy learning about death, The Going Is Forever is a book of holding on and letting go, tracking the non-linear journeys we take and the daily distances we cross for intimacy. Braiding together a dissolving marriage, a son’s medical crisis, and the death of a father, these poems wrestle with the structures of a life. An overgrown yard yields a crisis of faith. A trip to the farmer’s market invites questions of monogamy. A degenerative disease spurs a creative awakening. How do we relate to what we cannot know about those we love and how can we separate from one another without embodying parts of ourselves that we have not yet met?
Celebrating the ordinary and extraordinary changes we undergo together, this collection gives body to our most surprising fantasies and deep spiritual yearnings. Questioning a “soulmate” becomes a quest to reclaim one’s own soul. These poems fall in love with the absences that define us, retracing our chosen roads while following those less traveled and beckoning unlived lives. In these domestic rituals and psychic experiments, the present revives the past, and every ending becomes a devotion to new beginnings. The ordinary ruptures of family vacations and flooding basements reconceive of loss as transformation and longing as a form of ongoing love. The Going Is Forever reminds us that our closest relationships contain endless mysteries and there is never just one version of a life.
If there is time, I may also share new work from a manuscript-in-progress that takes place in Posthumous Brooklyn and explores moods, mysticism, and madness.
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever and Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Bed and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have recently been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, BOMB, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn with her family. She has received support from Yaddo, PEN America, and Yale University. Metzger teaches poetry at Columbia University, the 92nd Street Y, and Poets & Writers. Website: elizabethmetzger.com IG: @nobodytoo2 X: @anelizabeth2
Monday, March 31, 2025
7pm ET (NYC time)
Free! RSVP with email at checkout
PLEASE NOTE: Video playback of free events is only available to Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanatomy.org.
This is a poetry reading from a book that confronts death, grief, and loss. From a dying part to a boy learning about death, The Going Is Forever is a book of holding on and letting go, tracking the non-linear journeys we take and the daily distances we cross for intimacy. Braiding together a dissolving marriage, a son’s medical crisis, and the death of a father, these poems wrestle with the structures of a life. An overgrown yard yields a crisis of faith. A trip to the farmer’s market invites questions of monogamy. A degenerative disease spurs a creative awakening. How do we relate to what we cannot know about those we love and how can we separate from one another without embodying parts of ourselves that we have not yet met?
Celebrating the ordinary and extraordinary changes we undergo together, this collection gives body to our most surprising fantasies and deep spiritual yearnings. Questioning a “soulmate” becomes a quest to reclaim one’s own soul. These poems fall in love with the absences that define us, retracing our chosen roads while following those less traveled and beckoning unlived lives. In these domestic rituals and psychic experiments, the present revives the past, and every ending becomes a devotion to new beginnings. The ordinary ruptures of family vacations and flooding basements reconceive of loss as transformation and longing as a form of ongoing love. The Going Is Forever reminds us that our closest relationships contain endless mysteries and there is never just one version of a life.
If there is time, I may also share new work from a manuscript-in-progress that takes place in Posthumous Brooklyn and explores moods, mysticism, and madness.
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever and Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Bed and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have recently been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, BOMB, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn with her family. She has received support from Yaddo, PEN America, and Yale University. Metzger teaches poetry at Columbia University, the 92nd Street Y, and Poets & Writers. Website: elizabethmetzger.com IG: @nobodytoo2 X: @anelizabeth2