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WELCOME!  
This website will give you a little information on the books, readings, and workshops of
Andrea Witzke Slot.  You can also read sample poems and find links to her online 
publications.  Please feel free to email her and let her know what you think, 
ask questions, or find out more about her readings and workshops at 
andrea.witzke.slot@gmail.com.  

Books

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To find a new beauty (Gold Wake Press 2012), is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble.com, and Powell's and other venues. 

TO FIND A NEW BEAUTY, Andrea Witzke Slot's first poetry collection, is a bestseller in the Hot New Releases in General in the Literature/Poetry and the Hot New Releases in Poetry on Amazon, featuring in the top ten on each.   

Andrea Witzke Slot (also known as Andrea Witzke Leavey) teaches at The University of Illinois at Chicago and is an associate editor at Rhino Poetry as well as the book review editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal.  See more under her bio page and about page. You can also visit her Amazon author page.  







FROM THE BACK COVER: 

Andrea Witzke Slot’s To find a new beauty is rich with cool, intelligent and carefully crafted poems that often have a subtext of terror and darkness. She uses a variety of personae—including Penelope, Eurydice, Io, the nymph on Keat’s Grecian urn, a woman who marries her sister’s widower and others—in land- [and sea-] scapes that are powerful personae too in these poems.         

      -- Marge Piercy

In the background of Andrea Witzke Slot’s To find a new beauty glimmers the controlling metaphor of the Biblical garden; in the foreground is the body’s desire, longing that reveals itself in tensions that roil between origin and some possible, almost imaginable, end point…This is a volume of poetry, then, celebrating animation, celebrating pilgrimage not so much in its common religious or secular senses, but rather in a qualified archetypal sense; that is, these poems trace the human quest to recover the sacred via the potential transformative powers inherent in human agency. 

       -- John Hoppenthaler

How have you been haunted? To find a new beauty, Andrea Witzke Slot's first book of poems, enumerates the many ways that elegy, witnessing, and the dead haunt the living. With elegies that at once celebrate the dead and long for their touch, To find a new beauty is interested in just that—finding a beauty in the refuse, in what is left, in the hulking remains of grief. 

       -- Roger Reeves

Slot’s work stands equal with that of Snyder and Oliver. With bewitching language, she pulls the reader into a gentle current of rolling imagery. Suspended within the flow of these pages, I was carried to a place of calm reflection. 

        -- L.M. Browning
To find a new beauty (Gold Wake Press 2012) is Andrea Witzke Slot's first full-length collection of poems. The book, which borrows its title from a line of HD’s, explores the more perplexing, terrifying, paradoxical qualities of beauty and desire in our social and natural worlds. The collection is a mix of prose poems and traditional poetic form in which images of the sea and the natural world mix with signs of contemporary culture.  Be it on a rural farm in North Carolina in 1926, in a hotel bed in Vegas, in an 1896 Edison "entertainment," or in the glass house of a Medardo Rosso's wax sculpture, desire is never simple, and is often caught in realms of waiting, searching, unearthing, and letting go. 

Check for further updates in the Print Series of Gold Wake Press (http://goldwakepress.org).  



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Reclaiming the Dialogic, Reframing the Topics: Culture, Violence, and Eros in Contemporary American Women’s Lyric Poetry

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The University of Texas at Dallas, 2008, 347 pages. 
Available through UMI. ProQuest® Dissertations & Theses
Also available through Google Books:  http://books.google.com.jm/books
Abstract: Contrary to Mikhail Bakhtin's beliefs concerning the monologic and limited dialogic properties of poetry, this study argues that lyric poetry not only integrates rich dialogic possibilities, but that these possibilities rival, and often even best, that of the most complex and ingenious novels. The qualities of lyric poetry that allow these possibilities to thrive, I argue, are musicality, ambivalence, nonlinearity, and subjectivity, all of which resist neat definitions or any centralized locus. I propose that subjectivity, in particular -- the very quality that Bakhtin believes limits the dialogic nature of poetry as it presents a solitary ideological perspective -- can set the dialogic in the lyric poem most dynamically in motion. This study demonstrates how a number of contemporary women poets are creating multi-voiced, multi-leveled poems that challenge the single-voiced subjective "I" so often associated with lyric poetry. Some of the poems explicated, for example, show how the "selves" of the lyric "I" (and, thus, ideologies) splinter into multi-dimensional "selves," while other poems present multiple, ever-shifting "selves" of a culture's past and present. The lyric poem's ability to mirror the counterpoints of "real time" dialogue through the interactions of these "selves" is directly related to its intense subjectivity. I also propose a new term, l'ecriture d'ambivalence, to illuminate the requisite interplay among the both/and as well as the either/or, which not only flourishes in lyric poetry but is also the bastion of dialogism; l'ecriture d'ambivalence captures the fleeting, momentary "I" or self that only has meaning when in dynamic interplay with a (likewise ever-moving) "other," as well as embraces such concepts of simultaneity and heteroglossia that are inherent to dialogism and lyric poetry. This study will position the lyric in a triadic of utterance (the lyric poem itself), addressee (women's voices, which are said to inadvertently embody Bakhtinian theories), and addressee (the reader whose "self" is likewise ever-shifting). This triadic will then launch an exploration of dialogic complications of "self," "other," and shifting identity through the current topoi of culture, violence, and eroticism in the lyric poems of Julia Alvarez, Harryette Mullen, Louise Erdrich, Jorie Graham, Claudia Rankine, and Adrienne Rich.