Overview

A dazzling debut that blends folklore with the everyday Drifting between the past and present, the material and the otherworldly, Who Follow the Gleam melts lore and magic with history to shape distinctive narratives of childhood, fatherhood, and personhood. In his debut poetry collection, Christian Wessels crosses centuries and takes his readers with him to Germany’s Black Forest, burning hotels, chromatic casinos, and Long Island’s dazing Sound. Uncanny elements of folklore and dreamlike stories are grounded in the atmosphere of the natural world as Wessels turns the sun, moss, and clouds into characters connecting his poems: “maybe I myself am the sun; am / the brilliant silence engraved / in stone; am the arc / through which the future becomes / legible.” In the world of this collection, intuition, feelings, dreams, and spells mimic cycles, patterns, rules, and structure as the speaker disappears in the magic of language, only to resurface in the everyday. In four sections, Wessels reckons with a changing world, evolving and sometimes unfamiliar, while coming to terms with the uncertain future: “The cloud looks / like me, it looks like me because / the present moves, the present moves.” This collection is a sensitive meditation on the power of passed-down knowledge—personal and collective, factual and mythical—and how such knowledge finds its embodiment in the world.

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9781625349262

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Reviews

""I'll dare call this book of poetry tremendous. That word, rooted in trembling or shaking, fits the book's central emotion of awe. It also fits how Wessels shakes up expectation with nervy feats of imagination, encompassing various fables and animals, castles and Burger Kings, family stories and cosmic enigmas.""--Robert Pinsky, author of Proverbs of Limbo

Author Information

Christian Wessels is a poet, essayist, and critic. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Cortland Review, and Harvard Review Online, among other journals. His criticism has appeared in Literary Imagination, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Cleveland Review of Books. He is a visiting assistant professor of poetry at the University of Rochester. He splits his time between New York and the Black Forest of Germany.

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