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Home / archive / Love Poem by Elizabeth Hazen

Dec 29 2019

Love Poem

by Elizabeth Hazen

I love you changes me
into a tree falling

after erosion has its say.
This process does not

simply take away
the cliff’s edge— it creates

new space, frees me
from fear of stasis.

It tells me I’m still
young enough to be

surprised. I first believed
the tree was dead,

but months later
it blossomed, this emblem

of possibility prostrate
across our path,

this tangle of limbs
like a castaway

clawing her way back
from the sea.

"Love Poem" appears in Hazen's new collection Girls Like Us ( ASP March, 2020)

Girls Like Us by Elizabeth Hazen coverGirls Like Us is packed with fierce, eloquent, and deeply intelligent poetry focused on female identity and the contradictory personas women are expected to embody. The women in these poems sometimes fear and sometimes knowingly provoke the male gaze. At times, they try to reconcile themselves to the violence that such attentions may bring; at others, they actively defy it. Hazen’s insights into the conflict between desire and wholeness, between self and self-destruction, are harrowing and wise. The predicaments confronted in Girls Like Us are age-old and universal—but in our current era, Hazen’s work has a particular weight, power, and value.

Pre-Order Girls Like Us

Elizabeth Hazen Headshot

Elizabeth Hazen is a poet, essayist, and teacher. A Maryland native, she came of age in a suburb of Washington, D.C. in the pre-internet, grunge-tinted 1990s, when women were riding the third wave of feminism and fighting the accompanying backlash. She began writing poems when she was in middle school, after a kind-hearted librarian handed her Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind. She has been reading and writing poems ever since.

Hazen’s work explores issues of addiction, mental health, and sexual trauma, as well as the restorative power of love and forgiveness. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, American Literary Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, The Normal School, and other journals. Alan Squire Publishing released her first book,
Chaos Theories, in 2016. Girls Like Us is her second collection. She lives in Baltimore with her family.

Written by Alan Squire Publishing · Categorized: archive · Tagged: Bulletin 1

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