Leviathan

by Joe Wilkins

“Leviathan is a collection both celebratory and elegiac. Wilkins moves deftly from the natural landscapes of rivers and forests, to the domestic landscapes of garage sales and truck stops, to the emotional landscapes of terror and wonder brought on by fatherhood. He captures each of them in language and imagery as rich as the heart itself. Though the waters and people who populate these poems are often bracing, Wilkins never loses hope for long.” -Carrie Jerrell, author of After the Revival

“There’s alchemy in Joe Wilkins’s poems. Colic, junk, gutted factories, and rotten tomatoes become gold; castaway, castoff things at garage sales become luminous lists of all the things that keep us human. Some of these poems take us into birth-country; others, into the clutches of parenthood, into both literal and metaphorical floods. We think a chapbook is a little book, but no such thing with Leviathan. True to its title, this is a giant of a book with big-soul poems. This is no chamber quartet, but rather a full symphony of sonic energy and fierce, percussive love.” -Laurie Kutchins, Pulitzer-Prize finalist for The Night Path

42 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Joe Wilkins was born and raised on the Big Dry of eastern Montana and now lives in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon. He is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist. A finalist for the First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, Fall Back Down When I Die won the High Plains Book Award and has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and German. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and four collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994, and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. His second novel, The Entire Sky, is out now with Little, Brown. Wilkins directs the creative writing program at Linfield University and is a member of the low-residency MFA faculty at Eastern Oregon University.