A Point Is That Which Has No Part

Liz Waldner

After my last jaunt into the land of Liz Waldner, I was looking her work up on the Internet to research the review, and most of what I was finding on line seemed quite superior to the work in the volume I'd just completed. So I gave her another shot, and what came out of the library system's game of chance was this collection of prose with a few poems scattered through. While much of the work turns on the same punning as that in Etym(bi)ology, there are points in the book where it all comes together, and what you get is the subtle wit of Shakespeare rather than the meat-cleaver punning of a tabloid headline writer. While those points are few and far between, their sublimity is not to be missed.

Unfortunately, much of the rest has the same feel as did the newer collection; while the overtly political aspect that made Etym(bi)ology so noxious is mostly absent here (Waldner concerns herself more with the politics of interpersonal relationships), the stream-of-consciousness feel that simultaneously says "this poet has never revised a poem in her life" and "this is performance art/slam work, not poetry" is still all too much in evidence. I have little doubt these pieces perform admirably at readings, but on the page, they often read as strings of disconnected thoughts begging for being shaped into poems.