Begin with loss and see how the world contradicts you, how the horizon implies that beyond it the water is not empty but full of ships all docking at another island.
I’m one uncontrollable hunger away from ruin.
Despite my lovely diction I am going to die.
To what or whom does Lizzie Harris direct the imperative title of her startling first book, Stop Wanting? To the reader, the narrator, to desire itself, or to lack? This is a work of complexly, ambiguously layered narratives and identities. The opening poem asserts I want to say what happened / but am suspicious of stories. These lines become an ars poetica for the whole of this painful and exceptional collection in which the unspeakable is stubbornly confronted by a searing eloquence. This is a commanding debut.