Wilder

THE BOOK: Wilder

PUBLISHED IN: 2018

THE AUTHOR: Claire Wahmanholm.

THE PUBLISHER: Milkweed Editions.

SUMMARY: 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.”

THE BACK STORY: I wrote the majority of Wilder between 2015 and 2017, so a lot of them are motivated by the increasing instability of the Earth’s ecosystem and our apparent inability/refusal to come to terms with it. Against that backdrop you can add things like racism, police brutality, queerantagonism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, “regulatory capture” of the government by corporate interests, our desperate adherence to the myth of human exceptionalism, etc., all of which contradict the comforting theory that things are always improving, that we’re continuously on the up-and-up. And all those issues suddenly became even more urgent for me in 2016, when I was thinking about what it means to bring a child into such a world. The book came together pretty quickly under that pressure.

WHY THIS TITLE?: This is sort of a tricky thing, because most people will pronounce it like “WHILE-der” when they first see it (which makes sense!). But the title is actually pronounced “WILL-der,” as in “bewilder.” “Wilder,” used in this way (i.e. “to cause to lose one’s way, as in a wild or unknown place; to lead or drive astray” or “To render, or become, wild or uncivilized”) is pretty rare, so I’m never cranky when folks don’t read it this way initially; I’m absolutely bringing it on myself. The book is sort of unanchored in time, being post-apocalyptic but also savage and primal, so using an archaic word as the title felt right to me. The book is all about lostness and wandering and being at lose ends in one way or another.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Full disclosure: the book will not make you feel good. That’s not what it’s for! But if you like apocalyptic vibes, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, or twisted fairy tales, Wilder could be for you! The book is obviously poetry, but the final section is completely narrative, so there’s something for everyone.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“Wahmanholm’s images are beautiful and terrible, slowly constructing a world in its death throes. Her mysterious apocalypse is never quite placeable to a specific event, but she references barren landscapes, missing children, empty skies, and great journeys, and, in so doing, transports the reader somewhere completely and utterly new” (from https://flywayjournal.org/book-reviews/wilder/)

“Wilder by Claire Wahmanholm is a rare prophetic glimpse into a future haunted by the now. An alchemist of language, Wahmanholm’s first full-length book since her award-winning chapbook, Night Vision, is a revelry far beyond what I believed imagination could conjure. She gives us a complete stranger of a world, a planet ruled by its own profound logic of consistency and inconsistency—a planet that manages to feel frighteningly possible & intuitively true. In this book, Wahmanholm’s collapsing world is exceedingly full of texture, solemnity and phantasm. She masters a mesmerizing spareness of detail that causes the white spaces to blare in our ears. This is a collection of feral & harrowing emptiness. Imagine the loneliness of an endling. Imagine if Judgement Day were silent.” (from https://readmeridian.org/features/reviews/review-wilder-by-claire-wahmanholm/)

“Wahmanholm is a terrifyingly exquisite writer who takes us on a dream from inside the universe of the body to an outside world reduced to dystopia. But the ruin is rich with surreality that clutches to us like a second skin. Danger is the same as beauty here, which is the most seductive thing of all. The second half of the book is a journey through apocalypse in prose poems; but is it an inner state of being shining upon an outer existence? Poets are sometimes able to risk everything. The measure is how much they’re willing to chance. Wahmanholm does not back down. She builds a powerful influence in a nether world, incrementally, poem by poem, with constant tension and poetic will” (from https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/features/december-2018-exemplars-poetry-reviews-by-grace-cavalieri)

AUTHOR PROFILE: My poetry requires a lot of research, so I have a surface-level knowledge of a wide range of things, which makes me pretty good at trivia. I’ve donated two gallons of blood. I would like to live near the ocean. I have a Carl Sagan-inspired tattoo on my right arm. I’ve got two other full-length poetry collections out in the world: Meltwater (2023) and Redmouth (2019). I get up early. I have every scene of Arrested Development memorized. I collect houseplants. I love to make lists.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: When I wrote the book, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine the levels of terror and injustice and grotesque dysfunction that we’re currently living within, and which I’m afraid we’ve become accustomed to. The alien landscapes of Wilder were designed to highlight how unlivable and untenable fascism is. I’m always trying to use my poetry to resist the worst parts of the world and of humanity; to keep the terror fresh rather than quotidian. Ideally, poetry is the opposite of numbness.

SAMPLE: There are many poems from Wilder that folks can access on my author site, but here are two of my favorites in full—note, I talk a little bit about the background to “Advent” here and about “Beginning” here.

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 crack,
thought of our daughters’ hot foreheads,
of the fevers we knew would climb and climb
without breaking.

We were out of songs to hum.
Our throats were boxes of soot.
In our orchards, no more insect thrum,
no swallow quaver.

How did we dare have children we couldn’t save?

If we closed our eyes, the falling apples
sounded like heavy rain.

BEGINNING

A pulling began from nowhere. Book bindings came unglued, hairline cracks cobwebbed the backs of our hands. Caught in the middle of this force we could not call by name, we waited. Down by the river, no more boats. Even the docks had been uprooted and stacked on the shore. For a long time we tried not to move, tried to feel in the air where the pulling was coming from. Groups of us stood with our index fingers licked and raised. How long did we stand before we put our hands to our chests? Irregular thumps. Just there, just here. Kaleidoscope of wrong rhythms. Looking at the night sky, we could see new patches of darkness coming alive. Mornings were suddenly birdless, cloudless, without wind, bright deserts. Now we began to wonder whether we had done wrong things. Or rather, we began to wonder which of our wrong things had been wrong enough. Putting our hands out in the dark of our basements, we felt gaps in the limestone where there had been none. Quarries filled with unidentifiable slurry overnight. Rotten fish slapped their rotten smell on the riverbank. Something was going to happen, had already begun happening, but no one wanted to be here when it finished. There was one way out of the city. Under the streets was a set of sewers that led to the sea. Very carefully, we lowered ourselves into their metal mouths, leaving all the lights on in our houses. Whatever was watching us might be fooled. Xenon lamps shone like suns from the sewer walls, burning our skin. Yarn unspooled behind us as we walked deeper and deeper in. Zero—as in ground, as in vanishing point, as in where the reckoning begins.

WHERE TO BUY IT: Milkweed website or indiebound

PRICE: $14.88–$16

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Twitter and Bluesky: @cwahmanholm; I’ve also got an author contact form on my website!