Bøker i Wisconsin Poetry-serien

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.

"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"

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"

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"

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"

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

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"

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.