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Madeleine Wattenberg’s debut collection I/O 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.
About
Madeleine Wattenberg is the author of I/O from University of Arkansas Press (2021). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including the Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Rumpus, sixth finch, Fairy Tale Review, Mid-American Review, Guernica, Best New Poets, and Poetry Daily. She holds a PhD in poetry from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from George Mason University. Her writing has received support through the Academy of American Poets, the Taft Research Center, and the University of Michigan Biological Station. Her scholarship focuses on ecopoetics, queer ecocriticism, and feminist poetics. She is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Lakeland University.