Go Ask Alice by Liz Axelrod (NWVS, #123)

Recently, I had the privilege of reading Liz Axelrod‘s chapbook “Go Ask Alice” (Finishing Line Press, 2016), which was a finalist in the 2015 New Women’s Voices Series at Finishing Line Press.

In the collection, Axelrod invites us into a bizarre, distorted landscape echoing Lewis Carroll‘s “Alice in Wonderland” landscape. She doesn’t stray away from what we are all obsessed and anxious over–sex, body image, technology, politics–and makes us evaluate the world we live in.

More here: http://www.lunalunamagazine.com/blog/interview-with-poet-liz-
-axelrod-on-go-ask-alice

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

In Go Ask Alice, Liz Axelrod invites us to view the world through the looking glass prism of her thoroughly postmodern imagination. Ironically, though, instead of distortions, we enjoy sharp observations that capture our contemporary landscape with an irreverent and dark, celebratory wit. This collection offers a panoply of our common obsessions-food, sex, politics, technology-showing how they impinge upon and transform our many identities. As passionate as “full moon fever,” yet delicate as “hand-colored sound-bytes,” these poems create a wonderland of extravagant delights well worth exploring.

–Elaine Equi

“The sky’s the limit,” writes Liz Axelrod, “if you’ve got good aim.” She does. With Lewis Carroll’s Alice as a guide through a terrain of lived experience, Axelrod shoots the shit out of the clown circus that is life itself-and never misses. A single page has healing powers (and not only when watching Netflix). Meanwhile, Axelrod’s Saturn births the hexagon cloud that brings our matter home, home to these very healing pages.

–Sharon Mesmer