The Going is Forever by Elizabeth Metzger Review by Letizia Mariani

The Going is Forever by Elizabeth Metzger

Review by Letizia Mariani

Interview by L. A. Johnson

Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Publication date: 9.15.26

ISBN: 9781639551729

Review by Letizia Mariani

Anyone who has sat in an exam chair with gel on their belly and watched their innards show up like black holes on a screen has probably wondered how a plastic probe gyrating on their abdomen could manage to see so clearly. Ultrasound machines send sound waves through the body and convert their echoes to light. This is how images are formed: organs, fluids, and tissues are made visible by virtue of being impenetrable by sound. In her new collection, The Going is Forever, Elizabeth Metzger is after a similar mechanism. “There was hardly any / blood around it. I could not believe how whole it seemed,” she writes of a miscarriage in “Lost Soul.” “Some of it dense, some of / it spread translucent. Suddenly, I understood the ultrasound machine, / the way sound gives way to light, and light lets us decide what’s animate / inside the animate.” In this poem, as in her others, Metzger interrogates how a form might come to be as the void left by all else. What is known—the translucent ground that sound can travel, for example—sketches the margins of its antithesis: an organ, a fetus, a mystery. “One thing. One thing. One thing.”

The Going is Forever draws its title from one such mystery. In “Don’t Make Me,” the poet’s son cries as he asks about the aftermath of death: “So the going is forever?” The paradox of her son’s question is a productive obsession that Metzger turns over exquisitely, again and again like a precious treasure: the known is final and the unknown is limitless, and the two are sides of the same coin because the former cannot exist without the latter. The poet foregrounds knowability as a tool to map memory, pleasure, death, the family, and the natural world. Knowledge is tied to being; what can be seen or understood colors the real. But Metzger is most brilliant in her overturning of this commonplace. “I know everything except one thing,” she writes, still in “Lost Soul,” referencing “a game my father / played … in which I’d guess which / question he could never answer.” What cannot be known does not remain undefined but takes its form up against the known. 

The “one thing” in the shadows has many titles, and Metzger catalogues them all: afterlife, soul, belief, or simple negation. What slips out of reach comes to language precisely because it is slippery—this way, we give shape to what we know that we do not know. Naming, of course, implies understanding. “What would you name me?” the poet asks a tree in “If I Never Find it I Will Have Felt It.” “I would like to be named / I would like to be named,” she repeats. “You want to know me / You want to know me.” But Metzger is queen of contradictions. Paradoxically, we also give names to what escapes us. 

We could say, then, that Metzger invites us to think of knowing and naming as attempts to delineate, in the etymological sense of marking boundaries. The poet explores the edges of definition, sketched ends and beginnings, births and deaths, humans and non-humans, and the body’s membranes. In her exploration, she wonders about these boundaries, what they are and what they create in their circlings and exclusions. In this respect, the family is a form of particular interest to Metzger. She compares a family unit to arrangements in nature that do not name themselves into a social commitment. What are the consequences of this naming? After all, “a family / of sheep on the side / of a country road / don’t know they’re / family,” she writes in “My Nature.” As she moves through the folds of family life—an estranged and dying father, the composition and dissolution of a marriage, a hereditary disease, and children—she finds space in the tension between affective belonging and the organizing principle of the family. 

Space is, in fact, a refrain Metzger visits and revisits to put her finger on absence-as-presence. In “Fugitive Love,” she contemplates a pair of sculpted lovers at the Rodin sculpture garden. The domestic melts into the erotic as the poet’s attention moves from the artificial couple to her own family:

… I keep staring 

through the tangled bodies, afraid 

to return my gaze to the bronze surface,

return to my family. I wanted no one else

but you to be my children’s father.

What the lovers have that we do not

seems obvious, even in their sculptedness:

The space their intimacy makes for escaping.

Metzger pores over negative space to examine its central role in daily life. This may very well be the crux of the collection. With each poem, she finds new ways to tell us that just because something is unknown does not mean there is nothing there. Voids, wounds, nevers, and what-ifs are loaded mysteries. In “every door of the house” Metzger “find[s] silence,” she writes in “The Shrieking,” as if silence were a thing to be discovered. Like so, the poet lets the ghosts in. Absence haunts the collection with phantoms of possibility, and these phantoms do not stay idly still. On the contrary, they write our lives. “For each life there is another one you can’t have,” Metzger writes in “With Each Bird Flying, Time is Passing.” She “fall[s] madly in love” with the specters of alternative lives, longs for them, “wants to have them back,” and wonders “what in other lives we might have loved and what we might have called each other.” She writes in “Our Beginnings:”  

Once we imagined a house where we would meet

In the future, if we ever got separated …

Let’s go because we stayed,

Because we changed, because the real life

Is to blame. The real life made us

Give up on the fantasies it’s based on. 

Apparitions of what was or could have been walk the poet’s world among the living. The living, too, leave all sorts of spectral crumbs behind. Metzger wonders, for example, if bits of skin surgically removed from her son’s ears, “wherever they decay / … still hold all the days in his life that he had in them.” Fantasy keeps alternatives alive, and these alternatives, lived and imagined, haunt Metzger’s poems on the margins of what she knows. From there, Metzger explores how mystery upsets definitions. 

“What is it I am asking to open?” the poet asks in “Nevermind” about her marriage. This question, refracted, returns across The Going is Forever. Metzger looks for portals, and “doubt is a doorway.” Dreams, prayers, questions, desires, and beliefs puncture the boundaries drawn by knowledge. “Water leaks from the walls of my dreams,” she writes in “Mind so Full of Bowls,” and where the rigidity of defined forms gives way to the porosity of possibility, poetry is an ultimate portal. Metzger travels through it to other ways of being and (not) knowing, careful to dwell in mystery without enclosing it. In her final poem, “Sleep Next to Me Where No One Does,” she floats away from us though a skylight, “like a second moon / watching the candles and / its reflection sway in all directions …” Here, poetry smudges possibility into the present, and here the poet leaves an open mouth with a question in the throat, calling out so that its echoes will make shapes of the shadows of possible lives.

A Conversation with Elizabeth Metzger by L. A. Johnson

I first met Elizabeth Metzger during our MFA at Columbia. Though we were both quite young, I knew even then that Elizabeth had whatever “it” is—that she was a Real Poet. Her poems had a beguiling emotional intensity, were driven by strange and memorable images, and always took unexpected risks in logic. I was as dazzled by her poems then as I am now. In the decade since, Elizabeth has become one of the most meaningful people in my personal and creative life, and I’ve watched her life change alongside her poems. The Going Is Forever, her third book and second from Milkweed Editions, is, to me, her most risky and formally daring. TGIF weaves together the threads of an ending marriage, a son’s illness, and a father’s death, into a book that ultimately comes to define a self beyond one’s relationships. These are poems that will make you laugh and make you cry, but their startling, strange images will ultimately make you see the world anew. 

Over a few days through email, from Dallas, Texas and Los Angeles, California, Elizabeth and I discussed the making of the book, new stylistic changes in her poetics, and some of the emotional undercurrents to Elizabeth’s new collection.

L. A. Johnson: I had the unusual experience of witnessing the writing of this book—your drafting of these poems over years—and reading over it again now, it strikes me how differently poems can be understood over time. What is something you understand about the book now that you didn’t quite perceive during its making?

Elizabeth Metzger: We often think of poems as moments of epiphany–you don’t know where you are going until you get there. But in another sense, the poem is already there before you arrive. I wrote many of these poems to contain a specific moment, experience, or memory, but a recollected experience can’t help but be refracted by the moment in which it is written. That’s what ends up being interesting to me. I’m thinking of two poems that transformed a lot (including with your feedback!) when the real experience met the writing self: “Dinner at Horses” or “In Another Version.” In “Dinner at Horses,” I needed the rhythm of writing to translate the tension of what could not be said at the dinner table. Those details needed to be excised once the poem showed me what details added up to the feeling I couldn’t otherwise have expressed. Similarly, in “In Another Version,” I needed to wake from a dream days later to give me access to the feelings I had on one last walk as a couple.. Poems often toggle between timelines, but because poetry traffics in metaphor, some strange alchemy happens and timelines blur. Bakhtin referred to the chronotope in literature, an inextricability of time and space. 

By the time you read your own poem in the future, it is suddenly more present than when it was written. When we read poems, they somehow stay present, change with us, the same way eyes sometimes look different colors depending on the clothes you wear. The immediacy of the poem as it is written stays immediate like a mirror up to the version of you that reads it later. It is uncanny to be seen by another version of yourself. Maybe that’s a clue to poetry’s psychic powers—because the same phenomenon happens with someone else’s poem. At a different phase in one’s life, the same poem may speak differently but it rarely goes mute. This is part of why poems are so often taught badly as if there is one constant meaning to decode. 

With The Going Is Forever, I was writing from a place of total uncertainty and even desperation. Part of the shock for me is seeing how the poems, taken together, in book form were always aware of an ending. I also thought I was artificially combining father poems, son poems, and a marriage story. I had no idea they were all echoing each other, and that one grief impacted another rather than just overlapping in time. The book begins with a mysterious shriek. I guessed it was my own voice (I wrote this poem near the end of the process), but I still had no idea that I was writing about the birth of a new ability to love and not just the dread of love ending.

LAJ: It’s true, the poems seem to always know us better than ourselves. I want to ask you about the changes in your lyricism in this book; the poems contain what I know to be an inherent “Elizabeth-ness”—a familiar strangeness paired with strong associative leaps—but many of them seem uniquely interested in engaging in narrative. Could you talk about the shift in your approach to craft in this book, as well as touch on “De Novo,” a poem which I am a particular fan of?

EM: Absolutely. I was trying to test how much I could stay in real time and imagine out of it simultaneously. Or I guess the challenge was to see reality as the metaphor. Rather than viewing the moment of a poem as atemporal and interior, these poems exist as evidence of the speaker being alive even when the life that has defined her is turned upside down. Aesthetically, I asked: Can I be clear and still change or omit the facts? I craved a more intimate relationship to my reader, maybe someone to witness my experience when my usual witness (my husband) did not “see” me. I wanted to tell a true story without fidelity to the facts, a way of sharing something private while keeping it private. I hoped to chart the crisis of a marriage (the urgency) but also capture the way time feels dilated in the process (the stagnancy). I wanted to escape my domestic life, but I also didn’t want to miss it (e.g. my children growing). My fear of missing out because I was miserable ultimately fanned the flames of pleasure. A lot of conflicting wishes!

TGIF is my most relational book–it involves more dialogue and more poems in third person. In the penultimate poem “In Another Version” the husband advises the wife to write a novel and she responds that she has a “plotless mind” to which he responds, “Just choose a story that happens over a compressed time.” Looking back, this applies to the book, a narrative tightly wound around the end of a marriage. Each poem is plotless or else the narrative is always simply: begin with an ending and then change the ending. 

“De Novo” may be the most narrative poem. Unlike the moments captured in individual poems, this one tracks two relationships (son and husband) from the son’s birth to the present. The length of the poem reflects this, and its placement at the end of the first section functions as a sort of inciting incident, to speak in narrative terms. However, it uses a somewhat mythical framework. The son seems to change between fish and human just as he functions throughout the book as the most familiar cipher. 

The term De Novo refers to a genetic condition that I did not inherit from a parent and yet passed down to my son (the duplication of the gene began with me). When my son was born, I learned that I had a degenerative condition that leads to weakening, particularly in the feet). I felt closer to my son and also farther from my husband beginning with this knowledge. Every medical procedure endured by the son—including a surgical removal of ear tags and a neurological regression—brings the speaker and husband together while driving them farther apart. What surprises the speaker at the end of the poem is not a resolution with husband or son, but a recognition of her own capacity for love and pleasure.

LAJ: I want to know more about what you said: what happens to the speaker of these poems when the reader, not the husband, becomes witness to the life of the speaker? How does that impact the relationship of the truth and “the truth” in these poems? Especially as these poems consider such important personal figures, your ex-husband, your son, your father.

EM: This is a complex question! I kept reading it as the truth of the relationship instead of the relationship of the truth. I think that tells you how much I view truth as subjective. There is no single truth about what happened to the marriage, or even what it means for love to end, and that’s sort of why I chose the title The Going Is Forever. It asserts a truth that really is an ongoing question. The end of a romance invites the question of fate. When we think of soulmates, we imagine our choice of another isn’t completely a choice, is meant to be. When a marriage ends, what is it that drives that decision? How much do we have to revise our own belief systems?

To return to your actual question, how does knowing that a stranger might read my poems impact the way I write or what I choose to reveal? Well, I don’t believe that the facts are the truth. That’s why I like poetry. If the truth was just the facts, life would be easy (and boring). The truth is what we make of the facts, and in this sense, I wanted to expose myself completely without exposing anyone else. Whatever I say about another is my “truth” not theirs. Many moments are composite and distorted. The “ husband” does not eat sandwiches in real life!

I hope readers will think they know me, will imagine into my poems as much as I imagined into the familiar distances of father, husband, son. I’m pretty savage about what is permitted in art, but the whole experience of The Going Is Forever is about loving what is absent and accepting that if one tries hard enough to get inside another mind, one ends up discovering new parts of one’s own. I hope the reader does, too. 

The son’s wisdom was real even if I changed its context. Regarding the husband, I remember fearing, what if we end up working out? Maybe unconsciously I wrote the poems to make myself leave or prove to myself that I made that choice. Writing the poems allowed me to see that the previous two years were a small part of a greater story, the nearly two-decade “true” story, of “true” love. 

The book is an elegy. Elegies aren’t honest. Usually, they are a knot of memory and myth, fantasy and survival. An elegy for a relationship, doesn’t track a real ending. It imagines the beginning as it mourns and considers other versions of the marriage in order to bear losing the present one. In life, I was dead set on protecting the “truth” from the assumptions of others, even others close to me. In the poems, there are facts I have left out, but I hope I have hidden no feelings. 

LAJ: Tell me more about that “knot.” At the level of craft, how do you move between the invented and the real? What was a craft challenge for you in this book?

EM: I think the “real” usually inspires the poem. I am paying attention to the real world I live in and my feelings toward it. I find myself needing the imagination to comb and undo, fill in the gaps and make sense of. Some knots hold things together. Others are desperate to be undone. The idea of the knot, I hope, reflects how many ways the real and invented may come together in a poem. There is no formula for what the mind makes up as it tries to make sense of itself. 

Poetry is a good space to contain contradictions (Whitman got that right). But on a craft level, I don’t find myself making deliberate distortions or substitutions. I just follow the reliving of an experience without retelling it. I wait for some detail or image to draw me in, to trick me back into my own life. This happens with shells, mushrooms, and cherry blossoms, to name a few. 

In terms of the writing process, I write quickly and through to the end of a first draft, however messy. The poem “Nevermind” was inspired by real cherry blossoms and the idea of an open marriage flashing through my mind as I drove home with the branches on my lap. I didn’t try to explain the way the cherry blossoms made me feel, but rather to capture my fantasy through them. In the end, the poem is about the disenchantment with the very fantasy I was hoping to express. I explore this as a dialogue with the husband but a lot of this came from a dialogue within myself. 

Maybe narratives overwhelm me because they seem to demand, insatiably, more narrative history. I find that boring (except maybe in couples therapy). In poetry, the lyric image can carry an internal narrative without requiring excessive context. Narrative is just the context for the image. The knot, on a craft level, means the freedom not to connect things. After a line break, anything can happen. Without a clear connection, things tangle out of my awareness. It feels like being understood. 

In revision, I am free to change the original image completely or make up a new narrative entirely, merging the retrospective moment with a current fear or fantasy. To sum it up, I am disloyal to my mind each moment. “De Novo”, for instance, began with an imagined narrative in which my son has a tail. Through revision, he became a fish instead. The tail felt like an imposed conceit whereas water images seemed to be everywhere. Gills made more sense since the poem focuses on my son’s ears. The tail helped me imagine my son’s extra-ordinariness, but the experience of birthing a fish held more truth.

LAJ: I want to ask how you thought about the end of the book. If I remember correctly, “In Another Version” had moved around a bit in the manuscript, but I always thought it was such a terrific and terrifying poem for near the close. And it works so well in conjunction with the true final note of “Sleep Next to Me Where No One Does,” with the movement of the speaker floating above the yard and above all of the emotional drama. It’s a beautifully arced book. I want to know what you were thinking about as you shaped the ending of the movement of the book, but the ending of the marriage was still ongoing?

EM: Yes, the ending was hard to figure out. Maybe I had hoped “In Another Version” could appear earlier so there was more space to live out that version. Then, I liked the idea of the book ending with waking into another woman’s life. There is a move toward freedom in these last poems, but it felt too easy to end on waking up. Is she really just free now? One friend told me the book needed one more simple but otherworldly poem, a snuffing out, a hush. 

I thought back to the proem’s candled horses and the candles of the epilogue poem came to me. In the same way that there’s a break between the proem and first section, I was set on there being one blank page before the final poem. It was a lonely but overwhelming experience to leave by seeing my own life from that vantage point. Ultimately, the end happens after a blank page. Time has passed, and yet I was still there and not there, the vestiges of my past all around me, the past overflowing with everything that was and is still to come. 

In the end, one version doesn’t so easily become another. In the epilogue, “Sleep Next to Me Where No One Does,” I do get out of the relationship, but I also get out of my body. There is nobody else in the poem. I float alone above my old life. The book begins with the “unflown life” and the book ends with the “whole yard overflowing.” California yards should not overflow, but sometimes they do, and the grass gets very green at the expense of the rest of the land.

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever and Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She has published two chapbooks, Bed and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

Letizia Mariani lives and writes in Southern California. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Tint Journal, and Black Fox Literary Magazine, among others.

L. A. Johnson is the author of Nobody Brings Flowers (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming 2027) and an Associate Editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis (Graywolf Press, 2026). 

11 November 2026