She’d Waited Millennia

$15.00 paper | 64 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-936970-02-5
Publication Date: October 2011
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“Here’s a poet whose intelligence and imagination value truth above any of its enemies: comfort, decoration, lovely music, the blurring of the line between the personal and the human. The poems feel emotionally and intellectually spontaneous, as if we were present at their coming-into-being, a genuine writer-reader intimacy that’s hard to achieve at any stage, let alone in a first book. The poems about childhood and adolescence are among the most powerful I’ve ever read. Tough, sexy, probing, tender, devoid of sentimentality, fiercely intelligent, and always a step ahead of the reader, She’d Waited Millennia is an important debut.”
—Chase Twichell

“Rarely—very rarely indeed—a poet arrives in the world full-blown, possessed of musical mastery, cognitive penetration, yea, wisdom of the sort that eludes almost all of us almost all of the time. And utterly fresh, with a voice not-heard-before. Lizzie Hutton is just such a poet. The vision in these poems is radical—it cuts to the root, and captures the ebb and flow, the actual felt textures of psychic and ethical awakening. And the forms devised to manifest the vision are radical too, in the true, best sense of the word, so confidently achieved they can dispense altogether with fanfare. This book is a cause for joy.”
—Linda Gregerson

“In She’d Waited Millenia, there is a persistent, sometimes anguished recognition of the dominance of what we call the interior world, that world where we exist most fully in thought or perception. The phenomenal world of people and things exists alright, along with the names we use to contain them, and yet the recognition of that is too a source of loneliness, ‘just another story of the self and itself.'(“Low City”) The beauty, the courage, in the poems collected here is evident in the attempted transit from Self to Other, in the struggle between what George Oppen called ‘the shipwreck of the singular,’ and in the difficult, persistent hope to ‘say something to the others’ (“The Green Ray”). In her unflinching description of an individual psyche, Lizzie Hutton presents a portrait of the human condition which will be recognized by all.”
—Claudia Keelan

Lizzie Hutton

Raised in Brooklyn, Lizzie Hutton received her AB from Princeton and her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she now teaches. Her poetry has appeared in the Yale Review, Harvard Review, Antioch Review andInterim; she is the recipient of the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, a Hopwood Award and Meader Family Award. This is her first book.