I/O - Paperback

by Madeleine Wattenberg (Author)

Finalist for the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize.

Madeleine Wattenberg's debut collection I/O, finalist for the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, alternates between epistolary poems to the mythical figure Io and lyrical interrogations of science, myth, and the historical record. Wattenberg casts Io--the priestess of Hera who was turned into a heifer--as a woman struggling to navigate the terrain between choice and coercion. Accompanying the letters to Io are poems whose explorations range from laboratories to airships in their pursuit of answers. Here the poetic imagination emerges as its own laboratory, drawing inspiration as much from ancient myth as from science and steampunk as it refuses to be constrained by a final conclusion.

Author Biography

Madeleine Wattenberg is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Sixth Finch, Fairy Tale Review, Mid-American Review, Guernica, and Best New Poets. The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Taft Research Center, Wattenberg holds an MFA from George Mason University. She serves as associate editor for the Cincinnati Review.