Description

The Waywiser Press, paperback

Publication Date: March 11, 2025

Publisher Marketing: To Wildness is winner of the 19th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and was chosen by the internationally acclaimed poet, Paul Muldoon. As Joan Houlihan says in her enthusiastic endorsement, “Teeming with image, sensation and sound, the poems in To Wildness tumble us into a glorious exuberance of catalog and character, rural landscape and dark imaginings (‘We ate ants peeled from bark, a rain of plums / when he rattled the trees. Lumbering. Shackled.’). Ancestral voices speak from the grave; fabulist figures like the girl buried with a finch tell their stories; and contemporary ghosts only the narrator sees abound (Let me touch them as they pass.) A southern gothic atmosphere hovers here: shapes twisting in the dark and the language to conjure them near. What a rich and thrilling collection!