“Liz Countryman’s powers of description remind me of both Virginia Woolf and Bernadette Mayer: she looks at the ordinary through the lens of history, seeing in a dresser, a seashore, a clearing the necessary and ruthless work that is time. She sees the past always staring back, and the challenge of her poems is to make a more meaningful life out of, and despite, the losses and failures of that past—the twentieth century, hers and ours. I am in awe of the masterful poise of these poems—insistently gendered, often wry, always wise, full of grief and fearless confrontation and full of the poet’s ‘desire to be lifted.’ Green Island is a devastating book and a beautiful book, and it is a book to hold close and read again.”
 

Jennifer Chang

“You come out of a cave into a forest. Within the forest you find a clearing. The clearing opens onto a lake. The lake, you realize, is the ocean. Though you can’t see it, you know that in the middle of this ocean there’s a green island. It’s called Green Island. Your father had the t-shirt. You can see it in your mind because you were there. Or you were it, you were Green Island. You aspired to be. You don’t any more. But you remember the aspiration. This memory of an aspiration is a private map of who you were. Liz Countryman’s Green Island is the map of who you are now.” 
 

Paul Killebrew

“In Green Island, Liz Countryman’s beautifully perceptive and formally adventurous second book, she investigates how a ‘commitment to a disoriented wonderment,’ like an ‘arrogant fog,’ had once ‘obscured the physical reality of what passed.’ In doing so, Countryman does not give up surprise and ‘wonderment’ nor disorientation so much as she finds them in ‘undiscovered’ places as near at hand as an ‘embrace’ or when placing a ‘kiss [on] the inside of a turtleneck.’”
 

Michael Collier