I Wanted Everything

By Elizabeth Whittlesey

Poetry. Foreword by Timothy Donnelly. Sipping Diet Snapple discontentedly at a bistro, following Joseph Smith on his journey west, taking in the enormity of climate change, glimpsing her spirited alter ego Miss Muggins at the drugstore or the movies: Elizabeth Whittlesey's debut volume of poems is about the way we live now, amid the ironies, pleasures, and desolations of selves in the grip of natural and manufactured want. These are poems that speak, aloud and with improbable buoyancy, from out of the opposed demands of self-absorption and a wider social and ecological consciousness, and find a precarious but real equilibrium.

"It would be easy, accurate, and even comforting to describe I WANTED EVERYTHING as yet another book of poetry about desire. Easy because it's right there in the title. Accurate because, at the end of the day, that's exactly what this is. And comforting because to summarize this wild, capacious new thing as 'a book of poetry about desire' is to domesticate it, make it familiar. Readers of the lyric are at home with longing...Whittlesey's longing is situated...among the fluorescent aisles of all-night drugstores, or on the doorstep of overpriced Manhattan eateries, or in the freakish theater of the subway system, or in 'the dark cavern of Trump?/?Tower's underbelly.'...She has given us a book that strives like a champion, that face-plants like the best of us, that shies away and throws a fit. A book that reads us as much as we read it. A book that knows what we're going through, that moves us the way we need it to, that still hasn't found what it's looking for. Years from now, when they ask, and they will, what it was like back then, meaning the present, I will be kind. I will hand them I WANTED EVERYTHING, and I'll say take this, all of you, and read."--From the foreword by Timothy Donnelly, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1938308115
• ISBN13: 9781938308116
• Release Date: November 2018
• Publisher: Antilever Press
• Length: 116 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.5" x 9.2"