Bøger af Joshua Marie Wilkinson

The debut novel by renowned poet and editor Joshua Marie Wilkinson, TROUBLE FINDS YOU is a taut work of narrative fiction that deftly balances comedy and drama, mystery and tenderness. A revelatory work by a writer moving into completely new ground for himself.To say Harry Stables's life has hit a bit of a low patch lately is an understatement. In his mid-20s, he's been kicked out of his MFA program for fighting, his ex-girlfriend turned down his spur-of-the-moment marriage proposal, and he's spent the last ten days in his dad's falling-down Montana fishing cabin with his dog Greta trying to find out how his mother really died when he was a baby, something his father ñ now dying himself of cancer ñ has refused to tell either him or his sister their whole lives. On top of all this, he's just been to a party outside Missoula where he received a nasty dog bite and where he may have been an accessory to a fatal shooting. Ignoring the advice of both his sister and Calvin Hogan ñ fishing guide, old friend of his father's, and companion to the lovable mutt Herkimer ñ Harry first tries to untangle the details of the shooting himself and eventually winds up on the lam, pursued by persecutors both real and imagined. As the cops and the accumulated psychic weight of his actions bears down on him, Harry must ultimately reckon with what sort of man he will be.According to George Saunders, "literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form" and so it is with TROUBLE FINDS YOU, a modern-day Portis-like quixotic road trip replete with stumbling beauty and searing folly. Set against the beauty of the American West, this is a novel of many colors: a thriller, a mystery, a coming-of-age story, and a family drama. It is populated with characters ñ these men and their excellent dogs--who are sometimes frustrating, frequently stupid, often funny, but always full of life. Harry Stables bears more than a passing resemblance to the Coen brothers' Llewyn Davis, a lovable curmudgeon committed to a quest of his own design."Sometimes you look left or right and the world just plows into you, takes you down. TROUBLE FINDS YOU does the same--and doesn't let up."--James SallisFiction. Family & Relationships.

Swamp Isthmus takes the stripped, lyric voice of Selenography, the first book of Wilkinson’s No Volta pentalogy, and confronts a pre-apocalyptic vision of American urban life. Here, the city and forest are one, as are the river and sewer. The ghost and the body are one, and the buildings and the trees, the sidewalks and the switchbacks all fuse. The poems in Swamp Isthmus create the flipside of the pastoral—the urban returns to the rural, their fates inseparable. In this broken, scattered world that still finds a way to be playful and imploring, there is no respite in the trees and streams and no turning back on nostalgia for either nature or the city. Though the second installment of the larger pentalogy, Swamp Isthmus stands alone, archiving and organizing, rehearsing words to hold in the mouth for just that moment.

The follow-up to Swamp Isthmus, and the fourth book in the No Volta pentalogy, Meadow Slasher is a powerful and engaging split from Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s earlier work. All of the books in the pentalogy are connected through shared ideas, stories, characters, and settings, but they are also independent and unique in their voice and approach. Meadow Slasher is a meditation on violence and self, and it maps out the intensity of a break down, navigating a shadowy terrain of loss, dread, fear, and exuberance. Drawn from a place of questioning, the end result are poems that are eerie dialogic and unlike anything you’ve encountered from Wilkinson before.

Drawing from the paintings of Susan Rothenberg, Gwyneth Scally, and Eric Fischl, this is a book-length poem written in small fragments. It is formed as much by the poet's travels through Turkey, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe as it is by the movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Bill Morrison.