Wilder

“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.”

“Claire Wahmanholm channels the singular voice of H. D. as she travels us through a landscape wounded, this time not by the industrial military complex, but by the industrial greed complex. Wahmanholm’s gorgeous, epic lyric breathes across time and place, self and other, blame and consequence.”

“Here we are implicated in a never-ending journey—emerging from the underneath of things, the excavations of the world, the lightless places that lead to the sea. There is an abundance of being lost, of encroaching upon apocalyptic moments, of falling back to burning music. In Wilder, we are feral children left to our own shared devices, led on circular treks through one exquisitely strange illusion after another.”

“Claire Wahmanholm’s Wilder is bewildering and born of collapse. These searing poems spring not only from the end but from the imagined after, excavating from the ruins of this world ‘the birds swooping from the trees to land / beside their own bones, // our bodies reaching down to grab our shadows by the hands.’ I cannot recall a collection of poems that thrilled and devastated me more.”

“Long after I finished reading Wilder, I was in grief that its beauty had ended, and also in grief over the spoiled world it describes. The poems in this book seem like the texts written by an ancient collective—texts that are at once full of wonder and bewilderment, cosmic vision and earthly pain.”

“In Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm invents a language of disintegrating futures, using poems to take us through unraveling fairytales and the volatile terrain of our unraveling planet. Written in 2018, the book feels like a premonition of what is to come … What I appreciate most about these speakers is their impulse to move closer to one another. It’s a reminder to me to do the same.”