Whelmed

by Nicole Markotic

Dulge, rageous, couth, chalant—we think of prefixes as a few letters that change a word, but what if a word is lost without one? Each prose poem in Whelmed features a word that has been unhinged from its prefix, allowing new meanings—radically unfamiliar, yet uncannily intimate—to emerge from these prefixless word deposits. Part prose-poem sequence and part encyclopedia of unpredictably irregular terms, Whelmed is at times deranging, almost disturbing, sometimes detached, and ultimately joyfully disrupting.

Nicole Markotic is a poet, novelist, and critic. She is currently a professor of creative writing, children's literature, and disability studies at the University of Windsor in Ontario.

Genres: Poetry

105 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 10, 2016

About the author

Nicole Markotić is a poet and critic who teaches at the University of Windsor and edits the chapbook publication Wrinkle Press. She has published two poetry books, Connect the Dots and Minotaurs & Other Alphabets, as well as a fictional biography of Alexander Graham Bell, Yellow Pages. She is currently completing a novel.

Reviews

[ainsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.00.

Read for ENGL 336.01.

[Louis Cabri]

The act of placing verbal fragments, which are not proper word-forms, into prose poems - in other words, into syntax - brings this sort of linguistic fragment uncomfortably close to narrative homebase.