National Book Awards finalist
Acclaimed poet Susan Wheeler, whose last individual collection predicted the spiritual losses of the economic collapse, turns her attention to the most intimate of subjects: the absence or loss of love.
A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation; examples of memes, Richard Dawkins wrote, 鈥渁re tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.鈥 Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. What could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children?
Wheeler reconstructs her mother鈥檚 voice鈥攄own to its cynicism and its mid twentieth-century midwestern vernacular鈥攊n 鈥淭he Maud Poems,鈥 a voice that takes a more aggressive, vituperative turn in 鈥淭he Devil鈥攐r 鈥擳he Introjects.鈥 In the book鈥檚 third long sequence, a generational inheritance feeds cultural transmission in 鈥淭he Split.鈥 A set of variations on losses and break-ups鈥攚ildly, darkly funny throughout and, in places, devastatingly sad鈥斺淭he Split鈥 brings Wheeler鈥檚 lauded inventiveness, wit, and insight to the profound loss of love. One read, and the meme 鈥淪hould I stay or should I go?鈥 will be altered in your head forever.
"In Meme, the traditional elegy dissolves into excited bursts of imitated idiomatic speech interwoven with writing from a different register鈥攖he coolly removed, self-insightful lyric. That the elaborately constructed edifice that is personality can be reconstructed with such fascinating economy and delightful indirection is amazing. These poems are pure poetic genius."鈥擬ary Jo Bang, author, The Bride of E
"Meme is a haunted work. We are ushered in by the disembodied voice of a mother figure, scolding and teasing in the time-stamped slang of past decades. The anachronism is both funny and terribly sad. 'Don't come in here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,' the voice says. And it turns out that's fair warning. This cracked Virgil leads us into a consciously Dantean underworld ('Had you entered the thicket in darkness / . . . Had you been mid-life, not in haze but in crisis?'). Wheeler has created a total (and to me terrifying) linguistic environment in which hell is the introjected voices of other people, the hungry ghosts of our recent past."鈥擱ae Armantrout, author, Money Shot
Praise for previous books:
鈥淲heeler accomplishes something no one has done before, bringing all her interests and influences together to make poems that reflect an America no one else has seen . . . of how love in America might work: we never get enough, and . . . what we need is distraction, busywork, stuff to consume.鈥濃擟raig Morgan Teicher, Yale Review
鈥淎s the years and books mount, Wheeler鈥檚 verse feels increasingly grounded, without sacrificing rhetorical force."鈥Boston Review
Canasta
Mind your own beeswax or you鈥檒l be tarred and feathered right here and now. Ray, the dog鈥檚 got something in her mouth. While you鈥檙e up, would you check the ham?
You and the beast鈥檚 belly, its short sleek fur,
its odor of a world beyond the curb. The tail
rises, the fur fans out鈥
No, just see what the temperature is up to. Oh, I鈥檒l do it.
That鈥檚 what I was afraid of. Dan, she skunked me.
Finalist for the 2012 National Book Award in Poetry
