The Going is Forever

“Elizabeth Metzger’s The Going Is Forever is a gorgeous collection of poems that traverse a hive of longings and the dangers in asking for our desires to be fulfilled. Through experiences of loss, love, parenting, and a health crisis, the quiet and daring leaps of these poems often bring me to the edge of myself, reminding me that intimacy is one of life’s greatest mysteries. Even as beginnings are forgotten and endings go on forever, this book reminds me that I must keep falling in love with all the unknowns.”

“The poems in this book have the beauty of spells and the gravity of prophecies. They riveted me as poems rarely do, revealing through the deliberate holes in their lacework the layered story of a dissolving marriage, a dying father, and a woman learning to parent both her children and herself at once. I have long been a fan of Elizabeth Metzger’s work, but The Going Is Forever represents a quantum leap in her oracular, crystalline, and utterly original poetics. This is a truly exceptional book.”

“The Going Is Forever confirms what we already knew about Elizabeth Metzger—that she is an extraordinarily gifted expositor of life and death, of the self and its splinterings and stylings. This book is Metzger’s best work yet: tender and eerie, raging and insightful, relentlessly tacking toward truth. These poems will stay with me for a long, long time.”

“In Elizabeth Metzger’s The Going Is Forever, in each soul-stirring poem, I can hear, as if music, the wonder and terror of being alive. Death sings in pleasure’s voice, a daughter transforms into a mother, a marriage finds its end. I didn’t know until I read this brilliant, glistening book that there were so many ways to grieve, and so many ways to be born.”

“Often pain arrives so brightly we cannot, or will not, articulate it. Yet Elizabeth Metzger, a poet of staggering, intricate talent, knows this form of silence would rattle and resound far past the song of the original sorrow. Writing at this level begins with a high reverence for love, revealing its unseen dimensions and ways, that it can at once break and bind not just us, but itself. The Going is Forever is a treatise on the nature of love, and through Metzger’s raw and exquisite mind, reverence expands, even if she must admit that love can become ‘so clean with grief, / by the time we reach our house it is not ours.’”