"Elizabeth Arnold's greatly beautiful, wonderfully strange poems exist in a 'wave house' of memory, instability, and fragility vis-à-vis the body, home, the planet, the mind, and the importunate emotions. Lyrically experimental, experimentally lyric, restless, terrified, and calm, Arnold's poems simultaneously record and seek. The poems in Wave House are so unostentatious and yet so confident that although they never preach or exhort, it seems to me they teach a way of looking and living. Whether translating the tenth-century Old English poem 'The Wanderer' or writing of an invalid mother listening to 'sunshine service worshippers' singing 'on the bank about a mile down river, ' or of the rising ocean encroaching on her childhood home, or about police surveillance during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution 'as more than a thousand citizens / were on their way // to being killed in Cairo / while I stood there // falling love, ' or singing of the human condition ('You have to keep going all alone'), Arnold's poems have an astonishing capacity to seem fleeting and indelible, tremulous and staunch."--Daisy Fried, judge's citation for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America

"Arnold's amalgamations of history and present, self and other, conclusion and uncertainty seem to me the exemplary results of an intensely lyric sensibility. A young poet could go to school on this book. What continues to astonish me as I return to these poems, though, remains the seemingly instantaneous, almost unaccountable quickness with which Elizabeth Arnold transmits thought and feeling. These poems are both necessary, ineluctable, and utterly surprising. Reading them, I fathom the wonder Ezra Pound felt in 1919 at the castle of Excideul in the Dordogne, understand his praise in The Cantos for that simultaneous inevitability and undulant liveliness of the ancient architecture: 'And the wave pattern runs in the stone.' I also hear a contemporary voice with extraordinary range and intensity, an intelligence that glimmers just ahead of the contemporary, in fact--like a wave a little beyond the others, like the future."--Peter Campion, The Georgia Review

"In her sixth book, Wave House, Elizabeth Arnold's unpredictable poems mimic the incalculable movements of a world in flux due to social inequity, political instability, and climate uncertainty. Far-flung regions of the world take center stage, and Florida is a place that the speaker never wishes to return. Time is merely a suggestion, and the fluidity of Arnold's poems suggest that it, like other human-made concepts, was created merely to be taken apart and restructured again. Throughout the collection, structure is, surprisingly, necessary for the speaker's careful dismantling of self, place, and glaring socio-economic and political barriers."--Nicole Yurcaba, Colorado Review

"On the edge and alert, these poems have the searching voice of an astronaut trying to find the source of itself on a rotating globe, high on the octane of tongues. 'I'm lost. Where am I from?' is always a good question to ask, and it's a thrill to follow Liz Arnold's hunt for an answer."--Tom Pickard