I/O

Finalist for the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize.

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.