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WHELM

WHELM

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9883166-1-4

Pub Date: Mar. 2013

Pages: 108


By Dawn Lonsinger


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY 2012


Whelm is part wildness and part witness, part love song and part lament. It is an elegy to former times and selves that admits fear of a future where humanity, community and strangeness are lost to manmade systems. It is also an ode to oddity and intricacy. These poems attempt to understand how difficult it is to be a thinking, feeling, speaking being in a largely impenetrable world—both wordless and written over with various conflicting narratives. In this book, people are engulfed by immense forces, from natural disasters to love, and equally overwhelmed by their own feelings, desires, and ideas. A central concern is figuring out how to live an authentic life or have real intimacy in a world that rapaciously wants to name, categorize, and commodify us. Herein, language becomes an intervention, is textured and complex in a way that frees us from abbreviation and generalization. This book suggests that there is violence in the ideal, that cruelty often arises out of category-become-hierarchy, and that perhaps the only conceivable solution to our flooding is flooding . . . to resist being capsized by giving into the roiling mess of our hearts and minds by admitting the endless cataclysms of our love, our inimitable eccentricities, and the ineffaceable plurality of being.

    I so admire the tension between the macro and micro worlds in Dawn Lonsinger’s Whelm. Whitmanesque inventories collide with intimate interiorities. Dawn Lonsinger turns a tough eye and a tender heart toward the experience of living fully in the rush of the NOW and the flickering echoes of history. These are lushly rendered poems to savor and/or to devour.

    —Nance Van Winckel, author of Pacific Walker (University of Washington Press, 2013) and 2012 Judge for the Idaho Prize for Poetry


    Dawn Lonsinger’s poems and lyric essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Guernica: A Magazine of Arts & Politics, New Orleans Review, Subtropics, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, and four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, and holds an MFA from Cornell University and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah.

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