Description:
“I imagine this “Lilyfoil” as a modern heroine, a no-nonsense young woman in the extensive nonsense of “scenarioville.” She cuts through the “postnatural pap” and keeps coming; sallies into the “sullied grainhouse” as necessary. Elizabeth Treadwell wades into the “pioneer rubbish” of “Rumsfeldhouse” and the tabloid rubbish of the reign of QE2, setting off linguistic fireworks until we become new Elizabethans.”—Rae Armantrout

“In her recent books, Elizabeth Treadwell has been pushing hard against language to get to a deeper and often overlooked musicality in our world. In Lilyfoil + 3 she arrives at a musicality that is feminist and angular; that is Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy; that is pointed and luminous; that is, in short, Lilyfoil, not lily flower.”—Juliana Spahr

“Elizabeth Treadwell’s art offers irresistible engagement with the intersections of poetry and fiction, culture and intimacy, revolution and description.”
—Carol Mirakove

“Lilyfoil is a biography. Set off by contrast Lilyfoil is impossible to pinpoint. She is the thing when not compared to something is as temporary as a monofilm candy wrapper…We must recognize the seduction of sentiment and the way that definition will suffocate. It is a tenuous line that Elizabeth Treadwell walks, seducing with memory but not letting the fog clear. One thing might be mistaken for another. And memories here don’t have their own particular values but one shared value which is neither good nor bad. Nothing can plague a person in this state. It can only tease them and lure them into fixing an identity. Which is where Lilyfoil leaves you.”—Sarah Anne Cox.

“In our culture now, where plastic-coated teenybopper music rules and the nuclear family is back in style, poets like Elizabeth Treadwell keep the voice of real pain, triumph, defeat, and imagination alive…Treadwell writes from inside people, not about them or around them.”—Fabula Magazine

“T’s imploded psychological narratives sally through various planes of reference and anti-reference…prettiness has been partly hijacked, so that it must accommodate vultures, tear gas, and oceans full of shit as well as tea-parties, flowers, and doll bouquets. This is a music gone awry from itself, but it has a beat and you can dance to it, reworking Chaka Khan lyrics as needed for psychoanalytic ambidexterity. So like she says, climb out of your shape and wreck it.” —K. Silem Mohammad.

“Treadwell’s writing is hardwired thus. The circuitry of sidewise histories, of permanently fractured nows.”—Lyric&

From The New Elizabethans: Modernity & Tabloid: A History Book

(from LILYFOIL + 3 by Elizabeth Treadwell)

My voyage had begun. And with the bitter cold came a new sound, pine forests of the
interior, breaking the spell. The area was wet and cold. Oh cut the shit, carrying her body
that dealt with disputes equipped to fulfill philosophy. I must look at him now, shivering
in a chair with rubbers and an elderly hat. There would be nothing left...there is a smallish
temple moment. Peck of his kiss. Emptiness passed through towns. The hospitality bowl
had to be moved to a new site. A coat of mail to protect the neck and breast.

in the first house....in the second....in the third.

to say what those guys were
scenarioville

that you may meet your own difficulties with a steady entourage. a photo of her doing so.
difficult shimmering climb of the wounded man, a crack palace source. young girl
wielded cool efficiency, more like a lady-in-waiting than a bride. six bodyguards, one
morning on the scale. a dressing-room prescription. parish of diverse careers. the
season is ok, confesses jilted fallen.

Review of Lilyfoil + 3, Elizabeth Treadwell from Rain Taxi Summer 2005:

"Elizabeth Treadwell's writing, in which human (usually female) figures
appear amidst fantastically embroidered surfaces, demonstrates
volubility, humor, and intelligence in spades. 2004 brought the
publication of two new volumes of Treadwell's piecework, which seems at
once medieval in its miniaturized exuberance and modern in its casual
entropies.

Lilyfoil + 3 is the more manageable of the two books, comprising four
clearly delineated pieces. The language in all four poems may be
described, in a phrase from the first, as 'gramophone jumpy,' and
linked by the appearance of idiosyncratic Feminist archetypes and
currents of thought. Though the subtitle to the first poem, 'Lilyfoil
(or Boy & Girl Tramps of America)' makes a nod to the non-distaff side,
the feminine "'America' is the crypto-heroine of the piece. While the
goodtime girl Lilyfoil draws a lot of attention to herself -- 'swinging
singing/jacques lacan let me rock ya let me rock ya jacques/lacan,'
'sallying' around, and 'making out with blanks. the princess/spontaneity. crumpled hula hoop' -- it is space itself which is the ground and field for all this physical and verbal action, and this space, with few exceptions, feels American: 'a bar/called downtown beirut, in nyc,' the 'pump saloon,' the 'mph city,' 'his beach apt,' 'outside of sante fe,' 'nicks vacation waterfall.' This tramping around
gives rise not just to the brief episodes of this quasi-picaresque, but
also, one senses, to its magpie language:

the toils of neverland audiocassette. field harnessed
to the great hereafter, but lilyfoils disrepute nones
spearmint drum; the heroes progress, the corny
uproot of raucous clubs. solvent any longer.

It is as if Treadwell wants to reclaim a kind of sprawling, thrilling
America in which the 'heroes progress,' and land opens out onto the
'great hereafter' without the cruelty and conquest associated with
Manifest Destiny. In this model, heroism is a kind of audacious
receptiveness, the 'toils of neverland audiocassette,' and ritual or
'nones' is made not out of purity but from 'disrepute,' from mixing,
the bricolaged, American 'spearmint drum.'
Less optimistically, the poem 'The New Elizabethans: Modernity &
Tabloid: A History Book' looks backward and over the water to England
since the Blitz. Here are female heroes, by all means; the piece opens
with an epigraph from the stiff-upper-lip 'Goodnight children' speech
by Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth in dangerous 1940. All sorts of
royal women populate the poem that follows, and their increasingly
ceremonial actions provide its surreal texture; they visit their
subjects, wed, or just exist, albeit ultrapublically: 'that you may
meet your own difficulties with a steady entourage. a photo of her
doing so.' Meanwhile, a counter-power begins to coalesce; tabloid
'scenarioville' becomes 'Rumsfeldhouse,' and the rest, unfortunately,
is history. Beautifully, Treadwell conjures a 'Dover Beach'-like
perspective to figure this diminishment in scale:

faint carvings base the moon, moonfaced seashell, cottontail, wind.
loose pyjama ship'sprow, little empire, little amusement drawer,
the no-it's-not banquet, the carousel'spull.

By the end of the poem, our female figurehead is reduced to a mad or
condemned woman, a jettisoned queen a la Henry VIII, 'the tin alms
plate slid through her door.'..." —Joyelle McSweeney

Excerpt

+


Rumsfeldhouse: green artificial light, popular demerits.
controversial bellhop, the skies rolled like scrolls.

Our tightening parallax candor,
our tightening spiral alacrity,
congealed oceans.

faint carvings base the moon, moonfaced seashell, cottontail, wind. loose pyjama ship’sprow, little empire, little amusement drawer, the no-it’s-not banquet, the carousel’spull.

pennyschool measure, won’tyou be kind then, so close to the fire. a form-fitting natural
history, call monsters to the walls.

the botox fury sort: underdead terms provisions, no wish to erase Abelard in proper measure.

a big, garrulous love
a long, purposeful stretch
the Pimlico tide

insert soft crater

great hooved clouds of nationalism

pioneer rubbish

it needs to be rid of its cord, pushing his mind o’er the landtrap, coexistence
anymore

+

peripeteia

bright blue modernity
no, we are not accidents
of long ago, the tongues made
of tiny little tongues

sorcerer of information:
off to impress him,
to offer him to scholars