Author Event! Elizabeth Metzger's "The Going Is Forever"

Elizabeth Metzger comes to Symposium Books to discuss her new poetry collection, "The Going Is Forever", with Tanya Young! Join us on Saturday, November 14th as we host Elizabeth Metzger in conversation with Tanya Young to discuss her new poetry collection, The Going Is Forever! Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase. About the book: A collection of “oracular, crystalline, and utterly original” poems wrestling with a life’s shifting social structures and the multifaceted totality of the self (Maggie Millner). Elizabeth Metzger’s third collection traces both holding on and letting go, tracking the non-linear journeys we take and the daily distances we cross for intimacy. Braiding a dissolving marriage, a son’s medical crisis, and the death of a father, the speaker reconceives loss as transformation and longing as ongoing love, exploring the multiplicity of the self in proximity to others. How do we relate to what we cannot know about those we love? How can we separate from one another without embodying parts of ourselves we haven’t met yet? The present revives the past, and every ending becomes a devotion to new beginnings as Metzger transforms ordinary domestic ruptures into intimate portals of pleasure and pain. A degenerative disease spurs a creative awakening. A trip to the farmer’s market invites questions of monogamy. An overgrown yard yields a crisis of faith. These poems fall in love with the absences that define us, retracing our chosen roads while following those less traveled and beckoning unlived lives. Celebrating the ordinary and extraordinary changes we undergo together, this collection explores our most surprising fantasies and deep spiritual yearnings. An honest, intricate, and breathtaking distillation of love’s true nature, The Going Is Forever reminds us that our closest relationships contain endless mysteries, and that there is never just one version of a life. About the author: Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever, which will be published 9/15/2026 with Milkweed Editions. Her previous collections include Lying In and The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She has published two chapbooks, Bed, winner of the Sunken Garden Prize, and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review, TLS, and Poetry. She has received support for her work from The Corporation of Yaddo and teaches at Columbia University and the 92nd Street Y. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books. About the moderator: Tanya Young is a Doctoral Student in English Literature and Creative Writing and an Instructor of Record at the University of Rhode Island. Originally from Washington, she holds a BS in Psychology from Western Washington University and an MFA in Poetry from Western Washington University. She was the 2022-2023 Editor at The Bellingham Review. She is a 2024 VONA alum. As a writer her work has been featured in publications such as The Amistad, Stonecoast Review, Salt Hill, New York Quarterly, QU Literary Magazine and others. She is a staff reader for TriQuarterly and has read for such publications as Tupelo Press, Frontier Poetry and The Maine Review.