Lisa Summe has reviewed Madeleine Wattenberg’s I/O, finalist for the 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, in the current issue of Tinderbox.
Maddy’s debut collection is fire, the kind capable of igniting itself: “I don’t wash my hair for ten straight years / and each day the oil drips down my back, / a just-in-case gasoline that I keep close by (16).” Among the wreckage and the debris of violence, we find a vulnerability and tenderness and it is both universal and deeply private. I’ll be pulling this book from the shelf all year.
To read the full review, visit Tinderbox.
Madeleine Wattenberg’s debut collection I/O alternates between epistolary poems to the mythical figure Io and lyrical interrogations of science, myth, and the historical record. Wattenberg casts Io—the priestess of Hera who was turned into a heifer—as a woman struggling to navigate the terrain between choice and coercion. Accompanying the letters to Io are poems whose explorations range from laboratories to airships in their pursuit of answers. Here the poetic imagination emerges as its own laboratory, drawing inspiration as much from ancient myth as from science and steampunk as it refuses to be constrained by a final conclusion.
Madeleine Wattenberg is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Sixth Finch, Fairy Tale Review, Mid-American Review, Guernica, and Best New Poets. The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Taft Research Center, Wattenberg holds an MFA from George Mason University. She serves as associate editor for the Cincinnati Review.