Title: Wish meal
Description: Wish Meal charts one man's evolution from El Dorado pilgrim and prodigal son to a stay-at-home father, navigating from his Indiana boyhood to the family he makes in the Pacific Northwest. In Whitsel's poems, we encounter places, rites, decades and nights of perishable abundance. He nurtures apple trees, secrets, prize tomatoes, fascinations and bewildering kids. He navigates between the burden of an heirloom faith and the transcendence of Oregon rivers and skies. The Wish of belonging becomes Whitsel's grist, his Meal, subject to blemish and ferment.