ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

“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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Series Editor's Preface

Except by Violence (i)

Dear Io

Charon's Obol

Dear Io

Ars Mythos

Dear Io

Field Guide to Fission

Dear Io

Poem in Which the Trojan Horse Burns Blue

Dear Io

Invocation to Flame

Flute

Dear Io

Imprint with Need

Reconfiguration

An Inventory of Margaret Cavendish's Laboratory

Graf Zeppelin over Siberia

The Blazing Field

Uses for Late Frost

Dear Io

Osteoclasts

Echeneis, or Six Ways of Letting Go

Aphagia

Helium

Poem for the Father outside the Poem

Language's Anatomy

Consumption Triptych

Elegy for Escaped Aerostat

Dear Io

(Re)

Dear Io

What Happens in a Room

List of Forgotten Hinges

Dear Io

Poem with a Penny Underneath

Poem in Which the Sphinx Moth Is Again Mistaken for a Hummingbird and Myth for Science

Dear Io

Coin Toss

Name

Except by Violence (ii)

Acknowledgments

Notes

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