Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments (Iowa Poetry Prize)
“The dreamer is not quite asleep and so his conscious seeks reason at its most partial, least impartial. Thus, in Joshua Marie Wilkinson's collection, what initially appears fragmentary is really a subversive precision. What lures with its charms becomes strange and volatile: 'Home, almost, at / least where words cut your lip & I spoke / you together & then back apart.' Come: enter beguiled and leave haunted, where Wilkinson acts as a graceful thief---he steals his own disappearance and is the cunning agent of his own chimerical resurgence.”---Elizabeth Robinson, author of Apprehend“The epigraph to Wilkinson's stunning new book promises a light in which 'everything is meant for you / And nothing need be explained.' He gives us entry into a logbook full of riven epiphanies, ungettable coherences, ever-interrupted plots, and stabbing moments of visual, narrative, and emotional clarity. His obliquities and hauntingly urgent interrogations reinvent time, perception, and story and cast us into dusks of logic with brilliant illumination.”---Bruce Beasley