by Emma Peters
September 16, 2026
The Going Is Forever by Elizabeth Metzger; Milkweed Editions, 2026; 104 pages; $18.00.
Elizabeth Metzger’s newest poetry collection, The Going Is Forever, explores the “unflown life,” those persistent taunts by the paths not taken, those dreams of a life that doesn’t contain the tragedy of the chosen direction. In this exploration, Metzger refuses to tie bows of satisfied conclusion onto these past regrets or current griefs, illustrating to readers a different approach towards acceptance–one which can only be gained by allowing the pain of what could have been to exist in its totality.
Metzger opens her collection with “With Each Bird Flying, Time Is Passing,” a poem that places the reader at the final stage of this journey, looking back on what could have been. The author depicts a passionate embrace towards a life they’ve chosen even in the face of disappointment:
When the horses are gone and everyone’s fed
The unflown life comes
flying
I fall madly in love with mine
Quickly, readers come to understand that a conclusion as hopeful as this cannot be arrived at cleanly. As each poem narrates across disappointments, anxieties and a simmering unhappiness, a thread of blunt disillusionment is woven throughout: “The lives I gave up I want to have them back.” Metzger wants her readers to know: the route to falling madly in love with one’s life is not necessarily a romantic one.
The Going Is Forever is divided into three parts, each vaguely marking three different forms of loss: a child’s medical issues, a father’s death, and the deterioration of a marriage. Despite the collection’s structural demarcation, these events bleed together in poems from each section, illustrating how pervasive and intertwined the various heartbreaks of life tend to be:
Men scare me but I needed one to be a mother
After watching my mother serve my father,
I married a man who asked nothing of me.
The gender of the speaker is not incidental to the emotional journey described. There’s a feminine particularity to the disappointment of ticking all the boxes that have been foisted upon women as necessary for The Good Life (wife, mother, daughter), just to discover that “My mistake was thinking I could be loved/in little white squares.” The confinement of these little white squares reverberates through descriptions of a thrumming longing and sensuality; restrained but spilling over all the more in vivid images of unzipped breastbuds and “wetness under water.” Unsatisfied desire pulsates and overwhelms (“cherry blossoms from the farmers market/that scratch up my lap in the car/and press me against the window”) in response to attempts to adhere to the prescribed roles which claim to yield the fulfillment that’s being cried out for. Yet when confronted with this uncontainable longing, the promises of The Good Life do not hold.
With direct and lucid prose, Metzger brings forth the confounding mutuality of loss and desire. Whether it be the dissolution of a marriage which heightens sexual desires that have gone uncared for—“My longing comes to me like a hive”—or the death of a father, which prompts yearnings and regrets that could only occur in his absence—“Hi, I said to the room I was finally alone in. All those nights, what if I had simply said that?”—these expressions of palpable desire illustrate that loss does not smother longing but amplifies it, an effect laid onto the reader through a preponderance of images, moments, and missed turns in the past.
Memories are recalled with a narrative straightforwardness which devolve into questions that destabilize the shaky foundations which have been built to understand the self. “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” describes the singular instance of the speaker’s father taking her to the movies–“the first animation I trusted/while my father/needled above his feelings”--and then confronts this memory with the truth of its childish fantasy: “What did I trust?/Unreal skeletons lurching/full-mooned and curlicued.” Metzger wants us to know that loss does not provide coherence but provokes questions which insist upon themselves. By centering these questions which continuously evade satisfying or conclusive responses, Metzger allows for the regrets and yearnings after loss to have a different function. Their unsolvability allows for a fuller understanding of the very nature of living, an incomprehensible meshing of beauty and disappointment that cannot be dictated.
Some of these questions are to the point and cutting in their plain vulnerability: “Am I cowardly/Will I always feel lonely?” Some are more abstract and senseless, hinting towards feelings of frustration of that which cannot be undone: “asking the stump, Why can’t you just be a tree for me again?” As a whole, they contribute to the sense of existential unease that the speaker finds themselves in. In a poem titled "Don't Make Me,” a dead crab’s shell on the beach invokes the question which provides the title of the collection, as the speaker’s harried consolation to their son that death does not signify the end of things causes the child to cry out, “So/the going is forever?” By posing these questions which accentuate this ongoing-ness, this understanding that the rhythms of grief and loss are continuously present and that the transformation of self is always underway, Metzger invites readers to accept these truths for themselves. Yet, Metzger invites readers to gain this acceptance for themselves only through the humble stance of a helpless child, crying out. And while it may be painful to confront that one is no different than a confused child, vulnerable to the world’s whims, this positioning towards life allows for one to break free from the myth of control.
In the dissonance between what one thought their life would be and what it is, acceptance is slowly grasped: “What you thought you would need forever/would never have been enough/ You wouldn’t have wanted to be satisfied anyway.” Near the end of the collection, another surgery of the speaker’s son causes familiar anxieties and fear of what could be lost. Frantic questions are asked yet again: “are you listening? answer my question,” but are quieted by the poem’s closing lines, which seem to encapsulate what is required to fall in love with a life and self perpetually in flux: “He has to be born/He has to be born while he’s living.”
With grit and intention, The Going Is Forever achieves its aim in taking on life for what it is: ever-changing, disappointing, and surprising in its beauty. With raw depiction of the pain of loss, alongside bright pockets of budding transformation, readers will surely come away from the collection with a refreshing posture towards their own unflown lives.
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“The Unflown Life Comes Flying”: Loss and Desire in Elizabeth Metzger’s The Going Is Forever
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Ana Bregantin from Pexels
Emma Peters is a writer from the Bay Area. She has recently earned her Master of Arts in English from the University of Chicago and has work featured in ASAP Review, memoryhouse, and elsewhere.
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© 2025 Iron Oak Editions
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© 2026 Iron Oak Literary
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