Lying In

“I am a child / still of extremeness,” Elizabeth Metzger avows in her second book, Lying In. The poet’s first claim on extremeness was The Spirit Papers (2017), a debut perched on the cusp between life and death; its subjects included pregnancy attempts, a family history of miscarriages, and the death of Max Ritvo, Metzger’s “daemon,” at 25. These subjects persist in Lying In, which chronicles several pregnancies, two births, and a deepening of her losses.

Metzger’s first book approached its subjects with metaphysical conceits and baroque braids of metaphor; her second book opts instead for a pared-back, scraped-clean style. Out of the simplest words, the new poems alchemize sentences breathtaking in force while suggestively open to interpretation. “All my life all I’ve wanted was to be myself / and someone else,” one poem begins. That admission could come from an adult prone to childlike make-believe, a mother living through her children, or an elegist bent on reanimating her ghosts. The starkest pronouncements, wielding no verb flashier than be or have, acquire the solidity of definitions and mathematical equations. In a poem memorializing her late teacher Lucie Brock-Broido, Metzger admits: “There is no clear ill will / there is no bronzy heaven.” Like Brock-Broido’s penultimate book Trouble in Mind (2004), Lying In is the work of a poet resisting her own talents for embellishment and whimsy, taking from tragedy a deep, autumnal tone.

While Metzger’s aphoristic phrasings and pruned lines generally cohere in one- to two-page poems, her new book reveals a newfound talent for accumulation. Titles arrive in startling adjacencies: “Last of Kin,” then “First Anniversary”; “Marriage,” then “Roach.” In the astonishing nine-part title sequence, Metzger reimagines bed rest as everything from quarantine to a queenly throne, her tones ranging from uncensored envy—“Watching mobile women round out / is like witnessing the world // have sex / with not-you”— to a new mother’s doting: “I make my kisses heard / like tissue paper on his newborn hair.” With word-perfect precision, Metzger gives voice to postpartum paradoxes: “letting go is now bringing to life”; “I lost the baby, I did / even though he lived.”