Böcker i Wisconsin Poetry-serien

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.