Meadow Slasher

by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

The follow-up to Swamp Isthmus, and the fourth book in the No Volta pentalogy, Meadow Slasher is a powerful and engaging split from Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s earlier work. All of the books in the pentalogy are connected through shared ideas, stories, characters, and settings, but they are also independent and unique in their voice and approach. Meadow Slasher is a meditation on violence and self, and it maps out the intensity of a break down, navigating a shadowy terrain of loss, dread, fear, and exuberance. Drawn from a place of questioning, the end result are poems that are eerie dialogic and unlike anything you’ve encountered from Wilkinson before.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

Published March 20, 2017

About the author

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author or editor of fifteen books, the most recent of which is his debut novel, Trouble Finds You (Fonograf 2023).

He lives in Portland, Oregon, in the United States, with the writer Lisa Wells, where they serve as series editors, with Mark Levine, of the Kuhl House Poets series for University of Iowa Press.

His work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, The Believer, Iowa Review, A Public Space, and many others. After many years in academia, he now works as a psychotherapist.

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joshua Marie Wilkinson's pentalogy is thematically cohesive and internally dialogical, and Meadow Slasher continues this while focusing on the themes of self-hood and violence and the way the two fragment each other. Wilkinson's syntax is stripped down and he relies primarily on lines to drive his work, ignoring stanza and other formal breaks. Wilkinson's ability to focus on images keeps my interest, although his lyric intrusions can feel a bit too clever.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is the baggage for a lived life? How much of that baggage exists in the present, even as we view it as our past, but we kind of want it to be our present. Wilkinson offers the image of an apple rotting up from its core in the first quarter of the book, which seems this apt description for what it means to be beset. Like aren't we constantly beset by these past lives, sabotaging our present concerns, and meanwhile, we have all this ambition for really being present to our present concerns!

"Give me present concerns! Or give me death!" is what I might say. Not Joshua Marie Wilkinson. He's more the slow road. The knead-the-present-concerns-into-the-past mode. He's more the immortal words of Run DMC mode: "It's like that. And that's the way it is."

As a longtime reader of Wilkinson's poems, I like this method. I like how the social, the setting, the poetic occasion, the interrogative, the self-reflexive can all have their moment in this book. I am fascinated by books that explore the temporal and remark on the boundarilessness of it. While also kind of wishing there was just a boundary there to keep it tidy.

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fourth of the pentalogy comes like a swift kick of the 2017 urban and pastoral. As fluttery as all of JMW's poetry, and obscure and beautiful and quiet but filled with so much humanity, these poems are very familiar. But also they are quick and pronounced, holding the weight of a life lived.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Meadow Slasher” is a stab at stripped poetry from one long verse. Leaving behind no form of stanza breaks or any form. The words themselves speak in many dark voices. Interesting...

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wilkinson’s poetry comes from a popular aesthetic, at least among the knowing bunch, that is best described by Wilkinson themselves:

“cottoncandy surrealism & the so-called new brutalism.”

There are some fine lines and images and some strained images and juxtapositions. Often I believe the voice.

All in all, worthy of reading at least twice.