A new book by Elizabeth Metzger, The Going Is Forever, deals with partings. It covers not only the sorrow of loss but also the odd sort of new beginning that comes after. The introduction to the collection, titled “Nine Books of Poetry About Breakups (and Awakenings),” points readers toward nine poetry books that catch that awkward move from grief into renewal.
Metzger treats the end of a relationship as a kind of personal death. You lose more than a partner; you lose a version of yourself. The book’s poems resist the simple division between leaving and being left, instead holding onto love even after the loss. Her friends and family often ask “what happened,” looking for an explanation or a story. Poetry, she says, was the honest response she found.
“The need for the new love is faithfulness to the old,” Galway Kinnell writes in his poem “Wait.” That line captures the core tension of the whole project: the new love honors the old one even as it replaces it.
Carson’s Tangoes
Anne Carson’s Beauty of the Husband opens with an epigraph by John Keats, then weaves a meditation on beauty as truth with her husband’s beauty and infidelity. Each vignette in “Essay in 29 Tangoes” subverts the question of whether she will stay or go. Instead, Carson emphasizes how love often involves obsession and denial. “I can think of no reason not to be with you, except the obvious one.”
Carson tests the limits of form, proving that there is no one story to a marriage. The very language gets warped along the way. Virginia Woolf once said that “the little language such as lovers use.” And when that language falls apart, poetry builds new ways to speak.
Gluck’s Odyssey
Meadowlands, by Louise Gluck, turns the ruin of a marriage into a long talk with The Odyssey. She sets her own story against the old story of homecoming, speaking from a distance, often with irony, about her own worst losses. Instead of waiting faithfully for her husband to come back, like Penelope, Gluck takes apart the stories she has told herself.
The Odyssey closes with a return shaped by Nostos, the Greek term for hope for home. Gluck’s poem “Nostos” reverses that notion, making a breakup the means of going back to the original home as a wellspring of reality that can be preserved. “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
Sexton’s Rowing
Anne Sexton wrote The Awful Rowing Toward God over the course of 20 days, which matched the period she chose to end her 25-year marriage. The book opens with these lines: “A story, a story! (Let it go. Let it come.)”. She frames leaving the marriage as a journey rowing toward some new version of herself. “This story ends with me still rowing.”
Sexton sees divorce as both a gateway and a cleansing of “the rat inside of me.”. Parting from a beloved can mean parting with the worst aspects of oneself. It is a means of moving forward, even if the process is rarely easy.
Clark’s Loss and Love
Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth does not shy away from the grief after divorce. But the book ultimately celebrates Blackness, Motherhood, and Queer desire, awakening into a fuller sense of the speaker’s identity. The book’s own claim is that loss expands the capacity to love. There is only more and more love after a relationship ends.
In a title poem, an ode to “Black breasts,” Clark turns vulnerability into self-love. In the midst of feeling lost from oneself, self-touch becomes a reminder of being alive. “Do you want to see me / touch me? Sometimes, I touch myself / because I don’t know if I exist.”
Lim’s Reorientation
Throughout Sandra Lim’s The Curious Thing, the shadow of a breakup hovers beneath the surface, especially in the third section. The engine propelling the book, however, is a reconfiguration of the speaker’s sense of self within the world. The questions it raises concern how living in various places has altered the speaker, and how the past continues to shape the present.
The plainness of Lim’s work is deceptive. Simple language is what she employs to probe complex feelings. Yearning is not a lack but an invitation to the imagination:
If there’s something you desire intensely, your mind continually manufactures a narrative about how you’ll acquire it and what it will be like.
In times of isolation and rupture, poetry provides closeness and confinement, much like desire does during periods of crisis and alienation.
Olds’ Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize went to Sharon Olds for Stag’s Leap, a volume dedicated to divorce. Metzger recalls picking it up while still in high school, scarcely aware of what poetry was, let alone of sex, marriage, or divorce. She does remember feeling an extraordinary jumble of opposite feelings all at once.
The record documents a marriage breaking down, presented with unvarnished truth.
The Pattern Behind the List
Across all nine poetry collections, the subject is the same: separation. But each one approaches it as a threshold rather than a final point. Metzger’s own volume follows the breakdown of a marriage, moving through multiple endings where the line between parting and closeness grows increasingly unclear.
These poems resist the division between departure and abandonment, instead choosing to honor lasting love after a loss has occurred. When friends and family inquire “what happened,” they expect some explanation or story. Trying to respond, Metzger frequently found herself feeling false, protective, guilty, and above all alone. Through poetry, she was able to face the limits of privacy and openness, to acknowledge a loyalty that leaned more toward contradiction than toward a single individual. Within a poem, she could sit with moments of uncertainty, preserve versions of a life she had set aside, and open up to the future ahead.
These nine volumes of verse serve as a guide to a difficult landscape, charting the full range of desire, wrath, and grief while at the same time broadening the scope for delight, ease, and kindness. They do not present separation as a single conclusion, nor do they separate the rupture from the necessary enlightenment that follows it.
| Book | Focus | Key Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Anne Carson, Beauty of the Husband | Marriage and infidelity | Epigraphs by John Keats |
| Louise Gluck, Meadowlands | Divorce and homecoming | Conversation with The Odyssey |
| Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Toward God | Leaving a 25-year marriage | Written in 20 days |
| Tiana Clark, Scorched Earth | Grief after divorce | Celebration of Blackness, Motherhood, and Queer desire |
| Sandra Lim, The Curious Thing | Reorientation of self | Undercurrent of breakup in the third section |
| Sharon Olds, Stag’s Leap | Pulitzer Prize-winning divorce collection | Won the Pulitzer Prize |
Metzger does not rank these titles in any official order. Instead she offers them as suggestions drawn from her own reading history. Each selection reflects her own encounters with grief. Her intention is for readers to take up these works and chart their own course through loss.
What the List Tells Us
It is plain to see that a breakup does more than cause sorrow. It pushes you to examine your own nature, revealing aspects of yourself that were previously unknown. The suffering is genuine, yet so is the personal development that follows.
According to Metzger’s introduction, poetry serves as the ideal vehicle for this undertaking because it enables readers to sit with contradictions, to survive periods of uncertainty, and to open themselves up to the life yet to come. The small language that lovers employ gets torn apart, yet poetry pieces it back together.
These nine poetry books trace that landscape. They display the limits of desire, rage, and grief, even as they increase the power to feel delight, satisfaction, and kindness. They refuse to see a breakup as a single end or separate the split from the unavoidable realization that follows it.
The close of a relationship marks the start of the rest of your life, according to the list, and that same promise is made again in Metzger’s own book.
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