Steady, My Gaze

Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Publisher: Tebot Bach

PubDate: 2/22/2011

ISBN: 9781893670662

Binding: PAPERBACK

Price: $15.00

Quantity Available: 27

Pages: 80

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Poetry. "'Wholehearted' is an undervalued word; to my mind it means not blind enthusiasm or unthinking embrace but something more like the full consent of the self to experience, to be present in the glorious and wounding matrix of the here and now. I can't think of a better word for Marie-Elizabeth Mali's poems. She wants 'the honeyed sizzle beyond all language,' wants to be a vulnerable and conscious participant in the life of things as they are, awake to love and the struggle to live freely and compassionately. 'How to hold the ocean,' she asks, 'when the vessel leaks? Rise your wild, / dear animal...'"—Mark Doty.

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

Marie-Elizabeth Mali is the author of STEADY, MY GAZE (Tebot Bach, 2011). She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a co-curator for louderARTS: the Reading Series and the Page Meets Stage reading series, both in New York City. She is co-editing The Book of Villanelles with Annie Finch.

Reviews and Other Links
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“STEADY, MY GAZE is a metaphysical page-turner. Marie-Elizabeth Mali is not fooling around—she means to find her way to the real—each poem makes possible the next—a breathtaking debut.”
—Marie Howe

“Wherever her well-versed gaze lands, whatever chords she seizes and sings, however she chooses to tango across the floor of your imagination, you are assured to be embraced and hypnotically swept up by Marie-Elizabeth Mali’s stylish rotations of thought and pivoting reflections. What she executes in language, ‘all flit and hover,’ is no mere feat and goes beyond our standard fare of dramatic recall and gestural redemption. The poems in STEADY, MY GAZE announce this poet as, also, spiritually awake and sagacious, full of the necessary vitality to stir our souls, to make a distinctive sound in the din of our modern world.”
—Major Jackson

“Attuned to the sensual and the sacred, Marie-Elizabeth Mali is engaged in ‘the pursuit of some ground to call home.’ A restless traveler of the landscapes of self and the self’s origins, and of the heart’s affections, Mali is always a seeker reminding us to ‘Praise this beautiful, terrible world where we are opened / and rushed.’ STEADY, MY GAZE offers the gift of keenly observed, celebratory poems from a passionate spirit.”
—Kim Addonizio

“Marie-Elizabeth Mali is a poet of extraordinary sensitivity, who picks up the signals of joy and suffering and puts that music out into the world. She takes delight in everything from the mist of a waterfall in Venezuela to her husband’s creative use of bananas. She confronts mortality in a moving elegy for her father, in the suicide of her husband’s first wife, and the haunted words of a firefighter who dug up a human foot from the rubble of the World Trade Center. She is a spiritual and a sensual poet both, utterly honest and unafraid, capable of wonder yet grounded in compassion, writing from a tactile awareness of the body in all its grace and vulnerability. This is a steady gaze indeed.”
—Martín Espada

“What a perfect title for this book. Its gaze is steady and more: tender (there are marvelous and unabashed love poems here), illuminating, and bursting with a life force so strong and so rare that it should be almost illegal!”
—Thomas Lux

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