Finalist for the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize.
Madeleine Wattenberg’s debut collection I/O, finalist for the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, 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.
Read the preface, by Billy Collins. (PDF)
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.
“Wattenberg’s poems sparkle with stunningly inventive images. I/O is a book of expansive power and enviable craft.”
—Billy Collins, from the preface
“Treading territory between myth and self, science and the imagination, eyesight and insight, Madeleine Wattenberg’s irresistible debut makes harmony of many worlds. The poems of I/O echo, shape-shift, and experiment. It is as if these poems truly were a passage from one place to another: ‘A pocketknife rattles in the washing machine. / Spring hasn’t yet broken through.’ These poems are tender and thrilling. Without a doubt, I will turn to I/O again and again.”
—Sally Keith, author of River House
“In I/O we are asked to consider along with the poet how an act of violence can be understood and transformed into art. In her search for a valid answer, Wattenberg looks through the microscopes and telescopes of science as well as the lens of myth. The scientific and mythic are not alternate, either/or ways of viewing the world but rather layered, both/and ways of coming to know. So these moving, intelligent poems argue—and enact—in dazzling images and varied musicks. I/O is as complex as it is engagingly accessible. The more I read and think about this astounding book the better it gets.”
—Jennifer Atkinson, author of The Thinking Eye
“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.”
—Lisa Summe, Tinderbox, October 2021
“For her first collection, Madeleine Wattenberg has pushed the boundaries of our engagement with myth by traversing the field of desire. It is an admirable debut. It is perhaps most admirable when asking what Io of Argos never could: once transformed, who are we to blame for our transformation?”
—Z. L. Nickels, Salt Hill, August 2021
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry.
