Liz Waldner's books include Self and Simulacra (Alice James Books '01); A Point Is That Which Has No Part ('00), which won the 2000 James Laughlin Award and the 1999 Iowa Poetry Prize; and Homing Devices (O Books '98). Her chapbooks: CALL (Meow Press '00) and With the Tongues of Angels (Owl Creek Press '00). Her awards include grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Lannan Foundation, and the Barbara Demming Memorial Money for Women Fund, and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.

Praise for Etym(bi)ology

"Waldner turns to diaristic reflection, harder-edged experimental prose and typographical experiment in... Etym(bi)ology"
--Publishers Weekly

"Liz Waldner's Etym(bi)ology is that rare thing: a work that surges with political fervor and also with joy, humor and wild innovation.... I can't remember the last time I read such resolutely honest and straightforward (and funny) lines in a book of such formally avant-garde poems. The syntactical leaps Waldner makes . . . combine to form an utterly exciting and important voice . . . this is a remarkable, and remarkably female, experiment."
--Arielle Greenberg, HOW2

“Conceived as an investigation into "the concept of selfhood in american culture," these poems confront that issue with the only language that could possibly address it: American language. American not as a uniform category, but as a mixture of dictions and vocabularies. This is a book as likely to use blues lyrics as ancient Greek, one that deploys high Romantic diction and ad copy syntax with equal ease…. How language both creates and estranges us from notions of self is central to Waldner's oeuvre."
--Chris Pusateri, Electronic Poetry Review

“…a jubilant dissection of language… Waldner explores the convergence of history and the innumerable implications of language – she is an unapologetically political writer. She is not afraid to ‘Take the “Riot” Personally.’”
--Christopher Arigo, Pleiades.

"Liz Waldner's subject in Etym(bi)ology is fascinating...truncating the sentences, she's dropping what's said or thought for us, an abandoning which has been left out by all discourses. Her use of the word 'or' ('erotization or erasure') leaves huge gaps between any subject and any approach to it. It's a 'not supplying' that creates a different sense--this can't be approximated by any discourse."
--Leslie Scalapino

From Etym(bi)ology (page 10)

Etym(bi)ology

“Some of them are old, some of them are new,
some of them will turn up when you least expect them to
and when they do?remember me, remember me.”
--Eno

Chipped brandy snifter, crystal chrysalis, what I inherit from Athena Trasha. Oviter dictum: “He could only mutter, ‘Darling, darling,” as he kissed the ring with the ovarian passion of the sexually dispossessed.” No, not Ronald Firbank. (I am Athena Trasha you are Athena Trasha he is Athena Trasha, etc.) How do you think gu leor went from “enough” in Gaelic to “plentygalore” in English? A clue from Mr. Durrell: “Old Tiresias, No one half so breezy as…” “A ship without sails is like a woman without breasts.”

Ok, ok, I ask you. Is it not like the streets? If more women went out at night, it would be safer for women to go out at night. (If no men went out at night, it would be safer for women to go out at night. Argument ad hominem ad hominem.) So, if more flat-chested women refrained from affixing silicone bosoms, more flat-chested women could refrain from affixing silicone bosoms. (If no one were deciding the value of your being based on the size of your breasts, it would be safer for women to go out at night.)

Darling, darling.
(Sexually dispossessed.)