Elizabeth is a former National Endowment for the Arts/Maine Arts Commission fellow and her first poetry collection, The Chronic Liar Buys a Canary, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Her work has appeared in many distinguished literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Cream City Review, Witness, The Antioch Review, Artful Dodge, The Cimarron Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, The Sycamore Review, and Sports in America, an anthology of sports writing from Wayne State University Press.
Elizabeth earned a B.A. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.A. from the University of New Hampshire. Originally from Pittsburgh, she now lives on the Southern Maine Seacoast.
Elizabeth Edwards
The Chronic Liar Buys a Canary
by Elizabeth Edwards
Published by Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series
Book Reviews
Sherman Alexie
“I carried this book with me for a long time, read it on planes and trains, nearly lost it once in a rental car, but ran back in time to rescue it from my absent-minded self, and as I read it, and reread it, and read it silently and aloud, and stole lines from it for my own poems, I realized I was having a damn relationship with the thing. That's what these poems do. They elevate and irritate, they inspire and depress, they mythologize and demonize. It’s a powerful first book. Read it.”
Baron Wormser
“The current that pulses through these poems is exhilarating. At times it is almost giddy and at times it is pensive—joy looking at the face of time. Always, it is the stuff of finely tuned, throbbing language that is willing to enter into a remarkable array of situations and give off very genuine sparks.”
Jack Myers
“Edwards’ The Chronic Liar Buys a Canary is a fearless, incisive, tough-minded, and artful debut. Since one of the great pleasures of art for me is to witness the extraction of the eternal from the brouhaha of the daily, Edwards doubles the pleasure by performing this with considerable panache and verve.”
Judith Kitchen
“Edwards has real facility with form…combining traditional rhyme, inventive enjambment, and contemporary imagery to form her own, imitable style.”
Journal Publications
Some Poems
Cora Chasing Pigeons
in Prescott Park
Sept. 12, 2001
She shoves my hand away
and sprints toward their gray
gathering. But I see everything
in Kodachrome: Uncle Bob
in Quan Loi smoking Kools
on sandbags with his buddies.
Gram said he was on vacation
and kept the photos
tucked in her robe pocket.
My daughter runs through puddles
to cut the pigeons off.
Honey, you can’t catch wild birds.
I’m trying to save her
from failure. I’m watching
for messages in the flickering shadows
of maple leaves on sidewalk grit—
magician’s hands, all flash
and sham so no one notices
what’s being taken: a son
on vacation. She’s backed
a lame pigeon against the chain fence.
The Marines patrol the river
just beyond her blonde
body. She might be underwater.
Kneeling in discarded silver
gum wrappers, her fingers
close gently around its purple neck.
She can’t believe her luck.
The remaining flock explodes
in a ghostly rush of wings—
like chopper blades
blowing the veneer off the world.
Angelfish Sonnet
Instead of Amazonian basin rain
your wasted body’s nudged against the glass
by distilled water, pumped and pure. Bastions
of your diseased mind crash as tainted veins
leak life: a dying brother held sustained
by rubber valves and visions. Priests call last
rights. Nurses leach the heroin out—look fast,
how he swarms: but it’s no rival gaining,
just yourself: refracted angel riven
in mirror. What sham world would dare to cast
resplendent backdrops as your flesh shivers
and scrapes gravel. Translucent bones. Forgive
me. I should have known your sea soul—too vast
and filigreed to winnow through such sieves.
A Family Scatters Ashes
Over the Piscataqua River Memorial Bridge
in December
Not the peaceful letting go
they had envisioned with the snow
plows gearing down
behind their backs or me
and Ray from accounting
walking into town for chowder.
Ancient lift cables moaned
like frozen guitar strings
while the bridge operator
hulked in the dark
control box; his cigar tip glow
like a greedy one-eyed rat
sniffing the frosty air
for the unusual. Below,
the iced jade river rushed—
much the way the Abenaki
must have known it,
or the WW1 vets
searching the bridge’s dedication plaque
for some resemblance
between the muscled bronze soldiers
and their own ravaged bodies.
When the family tipped
the cardboard box over the railing,
the updraft blew the ashes
into their faces; down
their collars, into the creases
of their wool dress coats.
They had to hold their hands
up against it. Ray said,
“Man that’s rough,”
meaning the kind of rough
when numbers don’t add up,
not the rough of determining
where a father ends
and dirt begins. I hoped
the son would think the feat
his dad’s last practical joke,
or the wife, a tender refusal
to let her go; or the sister—payback
for a childhood betrayal.
They shook themselves off,
tucked hair into hats
and climbed into a Chevy Tahoe
they’d left idling.
All I knew was that I had just
spanned the space
between two states
and walked through the bone dust
of a man who had probably
loved border rivers;
had loved loitering down
at the commercial pier
getting in the fishermen’s way,
just to see what the sea
had coughed up. And I knew,
being in sales, the trick
the wind could play.
Ray and I looked back
as the bridge man shuffled
out of his box; his rat hands
held high against the frigid sky
as he kicked the dusty slush
cover the side into silence.
Rewinding Dorothy
My daughter begs me to make her sing again.
I walk Judy Garland backward on the screen;
arms awkwardly splayed the way the blind see
with trust first, then fingers curling through hay
and her dog’s warm fur just before she sensed
a rainbow above the gray stage.
Such artifice: the string that swings the lion’s tail
a zipper up his shaggy back, the twister—fans
and spinning muslin. And when Buddy Ebsen almost died
from aluminum dust, they replaced him
with a man who knew my daughter’s crying trick:
weeping gets you what you want. By midnight, she’s won
the horse that changes color, six times replayed.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain—
gaze into the flames where a hazy parallel life
shows me eating lemon ice before Ghiberti’s golden doors
with my art students. A lover cooks white beans for me
in a basement flat and every afternoon leaks
pink and saffron. But it wasn’t the same horse.
For each shot they trotted in a different dyed mare.
And rewinding, I realize she never wanted home;
having dipped her feet in ruby blaze
as dancing girls twined ribbon in her hair, she knew
where she belonged. Ignore the seams—semblance
is all you need to spin what you’re destined to lose
back into being: a daughter just laid down to sleep
reaching up for more kisses. Or blinking dry snow
from your lashes as you wake in paper poppies;
everything ahead, emerald-shimmer so that
there she is again, beginning.
Readings & Appearances
