Liontaming in America

Elizabeth Willis

eBook - 2024

A spiraling, staggering new collection of historical and mythic reinvention (and Elizabeth Willis's first book with New Directions) LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY "To disrupt the relationship of predator and prey, to reshape one's relation to power, is to renovate the lived and living world," Elizabeth Willis writes in her visionary work that delves deep into the ancient enchantments and disciplinary displays of the circus. Liontaming in America investigates the utopian aspirations fleetingly enacted in the polyamorous life of a nineteenth-century Mormon community, interweaving archival and personal threads with the histories of domestic labor, extraction economies, and the performance of family i...n theater, film, and everyday life. Lines reverberate between worldliness and devotion, between Peter Pan and Close Encounters, between Paul Robeson and Maude Adams, between leaps of faith and passionate... more