The chronic liar buys a canary
By: Elizabeth Edwards.
Series: Carnegie Mellon poetry series; Carnegie Mellon poetry.
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Pittsburgh
Language: eng
Number of pages: 95
Description: BACK COVER BLURBS: THE CHRONIC LIAR BUYS A CANARY

I carried this book with me for a long time, read it on planes and trains,
nearly lost it once in a rental car, but ran back in time to rescue it from
my absent-minded self, and as I read it, and reread it, and read it silently
and aloud, and stole lines from it for my own poems, I realized I was having
a damn relationship with the thing. That's what these poems do. They elevate
and irritate, they inspire and depress, they mythologize and demonize. It's
a powerful first book. Read it.

—Sherman Alexie

Elizabeth Edwards’ The Chronic Liar Buys a Canary is a fearless, incisive,
tough-minded, and artful debut. Since one of the great pleasures of art for
me is to witness the extraction of the eternal from the brouhaha of the
daily, Edwards doubles the pleasure by performing this with considerable
panache and verve.

—Jack Myers

The current that pulses through these poems is exhilarating. At times it is
almost giddy and at times it is pensive-joy looking at the face of time.
Always, it is the stuff of finely tuned, throbbing language that is willing
to enter into a remarkable array of situations and give off very genuine
sparks.

—Baron Wormser

Edwards has real facility with form…[combining] traditional rhyme, inventive enjambment, and contemporary imagery to form her own, imitable style. 

—Review by Judith Kitchen, Georgia Review
Notes: Edwards is originally from Pittsburgh and now lives in Kittery, Maine. She has been a Maine Arts Commission poetry fellow and her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Southern Review, Witness, The Antioch Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Cream City Review, Sycamore Review, and The Florida Review.