Wilder

Claire Wahmanholm

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781571319951
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

A prize-winning debut poetry collection touching on themes of nature, loss, and history. In Wilder —selected by Rick Barot as the winner of the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Claire Wahmanholm maps an alien but unnervingly familiar world as it accelerates into cataclysm. Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos—and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan's hopeful words are fissured by erasure—yawns wide. Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. "Some of us didn't have lungs left, " writes Wahmanholm. "So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky—when we were told to pay attention to our breath —we had to improvise." The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is "black at noon, black in the afternoon." Praise for Wilder "Full of wonder and bewilderment, cosmic vision and earthly pain." —Rick Barot "A lyric and formally daring collection." — Poets & Writers "Wahmanholm moves lyrically through an apocalyptic disaster in her stunning and disquieting debut.... Wahmanholm's poems are studies in devastation and stark representations of the accompanying shock." — Publishers Weekly "Wahmanholm's careful curation of words and sounds cradle the reader.... The poems in Wilder are powerful and compelling, interested not only in confronting the rifts in our history and landscape, but connecting us to each other." —Arkansas International

CONTENTS

Descent

*

[The Ocean Calls]

Advent

Afterimage

Aftersky

[The Dark Is Everywhere]

The Meadow, the River

[We Had a Taste for Error]

The Meadow, the Lake

[An Alien General Collected Us]

Where I Went Afterward

Breach

[In a Flash of Light]

How I Dreamed There

[The World is Very Distant]

*

Red Rover

B

[Men Wander among Us]

Simon Says

G

[We Grow Up Frozen]

The Witch

D

Poem after All the Children Have Disappeared

Afterbodies

W

State of Emergency

[At the End]

*

Beginning

The Jellyfish

Misery Rift

Still the Sea

No Stars

The Pit

Relaxation Tape

The Factory

Relaxation Tape

Almanac

Fuse

Relaxation Tape

The Carrion Flower

The Kittens

Bog Body

Reap

Relaxation Tape

The Last Animals

Night Vision

The Lodestars

Notes and Acknowledgments

wilder, v.

arch.

1. a. trans. To cause to lose one’s way, as in a wild or unknown place; to lead or drive astray; refl. to lose one’s way, go astray.

3. trans. and intr. To render, or become, wild or uncivilized. Obs. rare.

WILDER

DESCENT

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good

W.H. AUDEN

whose eyes have never really opened;

who were born with bitter seeds sewn

beneath our eyelids;

whose eye bulbs glow red when salted;

whose sockets grow tall bitter stalks

that sprout small bitter buds

that crawl with aphids;

whose faces are wild fields, and fruitless;

whose throats are peeled peaches, and voiceless;

who collect eyeballs like marbles

and shoot them around a dirt circle;

who drag sickles across each othe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Descent
• Advent
• Afterimage
• Aftersky
• The Meadow, the River
• The Meadow, the Lake
• Where I Went Afterward
• Breach
• How I Dreamed There
• Red Rover
• B
• Simon Says
• G
• The Witch
• D
• Poem after All the Children Have Disappeared
• Afterbodies
• W
• State of Emergency
• Beginning
• The Jellyfish
• Misery Rift
• Still the Sea
• No Stars
• The Pit
• Relaxation Tape
• The Factory
• Relaxation Tape
• Almanac
• Fuse
• Relaxation Tape
• The Carrion Flower
• The Kittens
• Bog Body
• Reap
• Relaxation Tape
• The Last Animals
• Night Vision
• The Lodestars
• Notes and Acknowledgments