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    Wilder
    Wilder
    Wilder
    Ebook73 pages35 minutes

    Wilder

    By Claire Wahmanholm and Rick Barot

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateNov 13, 2018
    ISBN9781571319951
    Wilder
    Author

    Claire Wahmanholm

    Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Meltwater, Redmouth, and Wilder, which won the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry and the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Grist, RHINO, Los Angeles Review, Fairy Tale Review, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, The Journal, and Kenyon Review Online, and have been featured by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in the Twin Cities.

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      Book preview

      Wilder - Claire Wahmanholm

      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 other’s skulls

      and leave wet symbols

      we copy onto paper—tales of ancient children

      who vanished in a flood,

      who stumbled from the spring,

      who hid inside a haunted wood

      to save themselves from drowning.

      The ocean calls.

      we

      cross

      six trillion miles of

      everlasting night

      we

      are precious

      tendrils of light.

      We

      may be a sun to someone.

      Why should we

      be

      utterly lost

      ADVENT

      In the first month of the year

      birds curdled the air.

      From our windows we watched them

      clench and billow, their wings beating

      so low to the ground that seeds rose

      from their furrows.

      When our ears began to ache from the pressure,

      we sent out our augurs.

      A great fire, they said,

      is blowing from the east.

      This explained the fevers, the mercury

      that broke the levees of our mouths,

      the apples that dimpled and rotted

      in our orchards, dropping through the leaves

      like heart-sized hailstones.

      Behind our windows, we waited for the fire to turn

      even as we watched the horizon

      go red from edge to edge.

      Every morning new packs of animals fled

      through our orchards. Every morning

      new apples dropped into the hollows

      of their tracks.

      We watched our windows warp and

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