Near Alcatraz, Poems by Liza Wieland
Forcefully grounded in the here and now, in spaces specific
enough to be located on a map, the poems of Liza Wieland’s debut volume
Near Alcatraz also gracefully reach
for what is beyond the local, into what connects us everywhere and anywhere.
Sample Poems by Liza Wieland
“‘The heart writes would; the heart writes wound.’ As Wieland’s
epigraphs instruct us, the heart serves as both narrator and protagonist of
Near Alcatraz. And indeed, all of Wieland’s narrative gifts are present
in these poems of family and faith, country and love. I’ve so often
found the poetic in her fiction; what a pleasure to find story in her verse.”—Kathy
Fagan
“The poems in Near Alcatraz
examine the excruciating correspondence between love and loss, how each small
separation is a premonition of the final separation, reminding us that we
will ultimately lose our lovers, our parents, even our children, and how love
makes loss inevitable even as it brings us enormous joy. Consequently, the
pain of loss is often at its most acute when the loved one is still present.
These poems speak individually and as a whole with the grace and beauty of
dancers, anticipating the moves of one another, responding, countering, intensifying.
Liza Wieland is a poet of enormous agility and wisdom; and she has written
a hauntingly beautiful book.”—Corrinne Clegg Hales
“There is so much to praise in Near
Alcatraz, which reveals what I, a poet, want to think of as the poet’s
soul which has so far publicly spoken mainly through the lyrical prose of
this extraordinary writer…I might point out an unusual technical grace
which finds itself at home in the most difficult of received forms, as well
as in Wieland’s loose conversational idiom; her dirt-plain level of
diction which sets us up for the subtle explosions of phrases such as ‘the
daily misprision of family life,’ or images like ‘your watery
veins, arteries wet and dark.’ I’d have to add to that this book’s
remarkably place-driven and earth-centered vision which takes everything from
NYC to remote Utah to heart, and its novelist’s gift for cataloguing
family ties and historical sweep…Mainly, I feel Near
Alcatraz is written out of a deep love for strangers and bedfellows
alike: it is warm and human and generous in its affections, and it is a sensational
read.”—Michael White
Liza Wieland has published two novels: the award-winning The
Names of the Lost (SMU Press 1992), and most recently Bombshell
(Southern Methodist University Press 2001). She has also published
two collections of short stories: You Can
Sleep While I Drive (SMU Press, 1999) and Discovering
America (Random House, 1993). Her work has been awarded
two Pushcart Prizes and a 1999 NEA Creative Writing fellowship, and
her poems and stories have appeared in Missouri
Review, Cutbank, The Journal, Carolina Quarterly and elsewhere.
ISBN 1932339744, 92 pages, $17.00