A Point Is That Which Has No Part

By Liz Waldner

Book Overview

This collection of poems explores various kinds of longing and loss - sex, death, exile, story, love, and time. These poems draw from culture, both high and low - Eno and Aquinas, Lassie and Donne,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0877457514
• ISBN13: 9780877457510
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Length: 71 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Yow! Smart stuff.

I am a simple man. I like ideas, but can't always grasp them if put forward in complex form. Liz Waldner is clearly off-the-charts smart. I don't always understand what she's saying (I don't understand most poetry I read), but when I get it, it is stunning. Nature, philosophy, math, feelings, sex all bounce off one another in this book. Waldner is able to reveal hidden relationships, swoop from the theoretic mathematical level to the sublime and stick something sexual in between. That is, in the opinion of this simple man, really extraordinary. Well worth the money -- if you like large ideas or poetry or daring attempts, this is the stuff. I look forward to more from Liz Waldner.

Just plain great poetry

Do yourself a favor and buy this book. I mean this in the same way as "I did myself a favor and had a massage". It is easy to love and be in love with this author. She strips edifices without pounding the table. She undresses, dresses and then re-dresses subjects with grace inflicting no harm but allowing the reader to walk away with a new appreciation of the complexity of the most simple of things. I object to the description above of Ms. Waldner as a "smarty pants" because that implies that she gets off as smarter than the reader. I don't get that sense at all. She could easily change her poetry with very few word changes to show life as brutish and short. But her writing is lovely, even loving because, at least in part, it is easy to feel like one is knocking around with a pal. It is paradoxical that such writing can unearth such passionate lines. The other part I like about this book is the inner sanctum one gets near. I became privvy to girl talk and it feels both tingly and welcoming yet foreign. To say it another way somtimes I felt I was seeing something private, unashamedly feminine.But feminine undefined by masculine, just feminine. The last thing I noticed about this writing is how self aware the author is of her own skill. Although at first I did not understand the title, I now see that the simplicity of the geometry it takes it's name from, Euclid's Geometry, can get increasingly complex with each hypothesis. Her writing is the same, seemingly simple insights woven into an elegant whole. A unique voice.I hope Liz Waldner becomes our poet laureate. We need her.