Bøger i Wisconsin Poetry serien

Daniel Khalastchi boldly strides across a landscape of smoldering fires, unmarked boxes, and pictures of senators in airplane bathrooms. Exhilarating and innovative, The Story of Your Obstinate Survival collapses genre and upends narrative convention with dazzling wordplay and thrilling imagery. Inhabiting a world trapped somewhere between dreams and reality, these poems fuse the political and personal, public and private, pleasing and piquant, to examine both calamities and the dogged persistence required to endure. On display throughout is Khalastchi's exceptional capacity for detail and specificity, filling up this world to the point of breaking but never beyond, insisting on survival despite it all. Crowds around the circus serve as means of an escape, a legislative party bus of palliative care. There standing by the advent tent are penitential dentures, striking in their likeness to entire choking towns. Backed down and bound the carnival carnivorous is glowing, a midway ways away alit and stilted by the night. --Excerpt from "Trying to I Can't Hit Anything Yet the Bodies Pile Up"

A chicken lives for eighteen months after its head is cut off. Tourists pose with an inflatable sex doll at the 9/11 memorial. A sex-reveal party starts a wildfire in a forest named for a conquistador. The author's cancer treatments are intertwined with the rise of domestic fascism. "Is that something I should put in a poem?" asks Nick Lantz; the resounding answer is yes! Mixing sincerity with irony, lyric with vernacular, Lantz's collisions of style and subject are at their most vibrant in the long sequence at the center of the collection, a series of poems that brilliantly capture the disruption and disorder of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in breathless, unpunctuated verse. Depicting the uncanny dissonance of living during and beyond events that feel world ending, this volume reminds us of the ways in which we carry our own traumas and the traumas of history with us in our daily lives. Life is all gilded frescoes > at the clubhouse until Titus and his men pass through with torches, until Cortés and his men > and his men and so on, until men forget what their hands looked like without torches. --Excerpt from "Ruin"

In raw, lyrical poems, Host explores parasitic relationships--between men and women, sons and mothers, and humans and the earth--and consideres their consequences.

Fiedorczuk was inspired by her readings of the original Hebrew Psalms, as well as by the process of learning to sing. In her poems she captures the heartache and joy of the Biblical Psalms, but in the context of modern life. She addresses climate change, loss of biodiversity, the upheavals of migration, and, in her most recent poems, the return of war to Europe: "Even when bombs are falling you ought to write / perhaps even especially when people lost / in the woods are saying cold, she is so cold." Fiedorczuk writes of the natural world, the built environment, motherhood, brotherhood, and of vast and tiny passages of time. And as she does, she discovers a new voice, singing to soothe and inspire. whose flower made from a clod of pain will enfold the milky way with its claws of time, its pelt of stars? --Excerpt from "Psalm XVII"

Originally published under the titles Dictado por la jaurâia (1962), Malos modales (1965), and Las contradicciones sobrenaturales (1967) by Juan Calzadilla, copyright à Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, Caracas.

Tacey M. Atsitty melds inherited forms such as the sonnet with her Diné and religious experiences to boldly and beautifully reveal a love that can last for eternity. Celebrating and examining the depth and range of her relationships with men, Atsitty tenderly shares experiences of being taught to fish by her father, and, in other poems, reveals intimate moments of burgeoning romantic love with vulnerability and honesty. Grounded in a world both old and constantly remade, she reminds us that it is only by risking everything that we can receive more than we ever imagined. All I know is it's the season when wind comes crying, like a baby whose head knocks a pew during the passing of the sacrament, that silence-- her long inhale filling with pain. --Excerpt from "A February Snow"

Grief fractures and scars. In Afterlife Michael Dhyne picks up the shattered remains, examining each shard in the light, attempting to find meaning--or at least understanding--in the death of his father. "If I tell the story in reverse, / it still ends with nothing," he writes. Yet it is in the telling that Dhyne's story--and the world he creates--is filled. The echoes of his childhood loss reverberate through adolescence and adulthood, his body, the bodies of those he loves, and the world around them--from Bourbon Street to dark and lonely bedrooms, from grief support groups to heartachingly beautiful sunsets. How we are shaped by our experiences, and how we refuse to be shaped, is at the heart of the poet's search for memory, meaning, and love--in all its forms and wonders. This bold and tender debut is a rousing reminder that poetry and art can heal. "It's one thing to remember, another to not forget. A girl says, Can I start with my birth? and I ask her if anything happened before that, her eyes bright with wonder." --Excerpt from "95 South"

The poems in Radium Girl hold dual citizenship in the land of the sick and the kingdom of the well. The point where illusion ends and reality begins is never clear, as Celeste Lipkes evokes saints, magicians, scientists, and caregivers in the process of surviving both medical illness and medical training. Slippery metaphors of rabbits in hats, doves in cages, and elaborate escapes explore the inhabitation of a female body as a kind of powerful and violent performance--where the magician's trick of cutting a woman in half is never as far away as we'd like. With humor ("When the doctor says, 'We found something, ' / I don't say: 'no shit' or 'oh thank God, / I've been looking for that sweater everywhere, '") and heartbreak ("Every evening I count the dwindling brass coins / of my patient's platelets while his wife ices / cups of ginger ale he will never drink"), Lipkes reminds us what it means to feel human, to feel afraid, to feel hopeful, to feel. I am the magician, even, some nights alone, finding inside the darkness a small, trembling thing I won't acknowledge as my own. This is someone else's rabbit, I say, and the silence nods back. --Excerpt from "Rabbit"

Appearing on the first page of Dante Di Stefano's Midwhistle, a flock of blackbirds braids its way throughout this book-length poem--an elegy to life itself. A sprawling, digressive love note to an unborn son, it is also a celebration of the life and legacy of poet William Heyen, a meditation on midlife, and an exploration of the food and fuel of poetry itself. Di Stefano travels through a controlled stream of consciousness as he examines the weights of joy and grief. Bearing witness to the world, Midwhistle unfolds and refolds upon itself, touching on Hiroshima, Bergen-Belsen, Charlottesville, the sacoglossan sea slug, Darwin's Arch, and much more. Stylistically formal, the poem soars and dips, lightly and deftly finding the light in nighttime meditations, as the poet considers "our Unyet son, lemon-sized, / amniotic cosmonaut," while imagining Heyen at his own age, "the thin black necktie of your / apprenticeship had not been / taken off yet." In these examinations we find the poet himself, faced always with a "blinking / cursor," seeking in the words and lives of other poets what it really means to write poetry. Midwhistle, in its meandering self-reflection and loving expansiveness, is a celebration of the act of poetic creation itself. > your beloved. --Excerpt from "xxiii. (interlude: prayer for Gaza)"

"Words carry the dead like henchmen," in Joshua Burton's extraordinary debut volume, Grace Engine. These spare and powerful poems are like pallbearers, like eulogists, like survivors, like battered souls hoping and dreaming for a future that may never be. Grappling head-on with the history of lynchings, mental illness, and the endurance of black bodies and psyches against impossible odds, Burton writes, "I spent so many years being afraid to be black, that now / I am only afraid of silence, / / or the silence that it brings." Burton experiments with spaces, absences, and forms in navigating the tensions between shame and accountability, guilt and forgiveness, to understand how one finds the ability to cope under the worst of conditions. With patience and ferocity, he delves into generational and familial trauma to question whether black strength is inherent to blackness and to build a mechanism to survive and heal. I love all the dead, > themselves of shame and before that. --Excerpt from "Grace Engine"

Moving beyond a biting indictment of American popular culture, Jameka Williams captures the reader's gaze and stares right back: "I'm sorry, America, but I'm rich in baby oil & paperback novels only these days. So finish paying for me with what is mint. No conditions." In this stunning debut collection, Williams offers a deeply personal investigation into how Americans (herself included) have been duped, buying into classism, sexism, and racist beauty ideals, while sacrificing the freedom of self-love and self-determination. With whip-fast profanity and fiery humor, she charts a tender, exalting, and vibrant path to freedom from mirrors, stages, and screens. Fiercely feminist, Black, American, and powerful, Williams speaks for a generation of obsessive social media influencers and consumers, revealing the complex ways in which we are all actors, witnesses, and victims in our public and private performances. Though we may be permanent residents of this soulless cultural landscape, this stunning collection refuses to let it define us. I am not the same machine which came rambling off the conveyor belt, hugging the bolts & wires spilling from her vivisection. I'm last year's model with a sleeker, softer system of cool disdain for my Internet addictions. --Excerpt from "I Intend to Outlast"

Blue sky, yellow flowers, cool jazz, and Renaissance poetry all inhabit Betsy Sholl's latest collection of poetry. Grounded in the everyday but never mundane, these poems remind readers of the wonders that surround us. From a child's drawing tattooed onto the arm of a mechanic to bats under the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, Sholl points to the richness of life. As the volume carefully and slowly immerses us in the poet's world, we gradually begin to understand that this is our journey of exploration as much as hers. Where does one find joy in the face of loss? Why does music exist in a world of grief? How long does it take love to overwhelm pain? Through these powerful poems we learn to see past the unreliability of memory and into the depth of the present. The child makes you a blue inch at the top of the page, and it's still hard for grown-ups to think you comeall the way down to the space between grass blades--Excerpt from "Dear Sky"

"I am going to make a poem," writes Emily Bludworth de Barrios, "As if / I could put beautiful things in a box to keep them there." With Shopping, or The End of Time she has done that and so much more. These kaleidoscopic images reflect and reverberate across time and space, revealing collisions of identity, motherhood, childhood, houses, shopping malls, industrial canals--the hopes and fears of what we've lost and gained over the decades in our mad rush for connection, for ownership, for goods. A detective's red thread spiderweb mapping the constellations among parenting, capitalism, aging, and ghosts, this stunning collection is wistful, unmoored, glamorous, and immense. These tour-de-force poems simultaneously capture an impression of emptiness and pleasure, of existing in a liminal space filled with both hollowness and potential. Even though we lived at the edge of a great rupture, It was difficult to tell when the world broke. --Excerpt from "Ravine"

Offers an unflinching, lyrical meditation on nature's forced exodus from the human, and the forms of longing, estrangement, magnetism, and self-otherness that ensue. In poems built to survive an unsafe journey, this book delivers the now-beyond, the almost-was, the near-forgotten, and the just-in-time.

Joshua Nguyen's sharp, songlike, and often experimental collection compartmentalizes past trauma- sexual and generational - through the quotidian. These poems aim to confront the speaker's past by physically, and mentally, cleaning up.