Green Island

Poems that enlarge our sense of what beauty and awe can be.

The poems in Green Island delve into the relationship between place and imagination, examining the ways in which the physical places the speaker occupies, remembers, and imagines determine and enlarge her understanding of self.

While operating with startling self-awareness, Green Island does not simply offer poems that interrogate the circumstances of their own making. The work found in this slim volume questions the poetic tropes of beauty and romantic love and their relationships to the lyric. Ultimately working within the confines of a received tradition to expand what is possible within it, Liz Countryman shows us moments of quiet revelation in the quotidian, the comic, and in the vestiges of popular culture.

Liz Countryman received her MFA from the University of Maryland and her PhD from the University of Houston, where she served as poetry editor for Gulf Coast. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where she is assistant professor at the University of South Carolina and coeditor, with her husband Samuel Amadon, of the poetry journal Oversound.