Meteoric Flowers, Elizabeth Willis’s fourth collection of poems, takes for its muse Erasmus Darwin, the 18th-century polymath, scientist, poet, and grandfather to Charles. Willis has written these prose poems obliquely around Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791), a long poem in two parts that makes surprising connections between nature, politics, mythology, history, art, and the human condition.

Elizabeth Willis’s Meteoric Flowers offers the reader a strange and at times almost overwhelmingly pleasurable world, one that is inspired (as Willis informs us in her “Notes on the Text”) by Erasmus Darwin, “the late eighteenth-century doctor, botanist, inventor, poet, and intellectual precursor to his grandson Charles.”

In Turneresque, Elizabeth Willis explores permanence in motion, thedifferences between a frozen and internalized moment captured in a painting, and the motion of film. Each ‘still’ creates the illusion of a seamlessly whole work or story, and, subsequently, a seemingly trustworthy physical universe. The ‘Turner’ in the title is a result of two intertwining explorations: the work of 19th-century painter J.M.W. Turner and a social critique involving media magnate Ted Turner.

While Willis would challenge the “Turneresque” valorization of Manifest Destiny, Turneresque implicitly acknowledges the accomplishments of past literary “frontier” exploration yet manifests continual efforts to keep the linguistic frontier open...if not with grand flourishes, then with subtle “turnings.”

• 1994 National Poetry Series, for The Human Abstract
• Howard Foundation Fellowship
• Residency at the MacDowell Colony

• "Vernacular Architecture"; "Madame Cézanne as Sainte-Victoire"; "The Oldest Garden in the World"; "Nocturne"; "Bohemian Rhapsody", Boston Review, November/December 2007
• "Without Pity", Conjunctions 28, Spring 1997
• "The Human Abstract", subtext
• "The Relation of the Lion to the Book is the Number 5 ", subtext
• "Envoi", subtext
• "Primeval Islands"; "Why No New Planets Are Ejected from the Sun"; "Oil and Water", No: a journal of the arts, No. 3

• Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003)
• Second Law. Bolinas, CA : Avenue B, 1993.9780939691081

Essay

• "Who Was Lorine Niedecker?" American Poet, Academy of American Poets, 2006

Editor