Wilder: Poems

by Claire Wahmanholm

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD IN POETRY

"After the explosion: the longest night."

In Wilder--selected by Rick Barot as the winner of the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry--Claire Wahmanholm maps an alien but unnervingly familiar world as it accelerates into cataclysm. Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos--and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan's hopeful words are fissured by erasure--yawns wide.

Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. "Some of us didn't have lungs left," writes Wahmanholm. "So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky--when we were told to pay attention to our breath--we had to improvise." The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is "black at noon, black in the afternoon."

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2018

About the author

Claire Wahmanholm received her BA from UW-Madison, her MFA from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, and her PhD from the University of Utah. Her chapbook, Night Vision, won the 2017 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook contest. Her debut full-length collection, Wilder (Milkweed Editions), won the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award. Her second collection, Redmouth, was published with Tinderbox Editions in 2019. Her third collection, Meltwater, was published through Milkweed Editions in 2023. A 2020 McKnight Writing Fellow, her poems have most recently appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Descant, Good River Review, Image, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Grist, RHINO, and The Los Angeles Review. She lives and teaches in the Twin Cities.

Reviews

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Palpable and relevant; like talking to a close friend about the world closing in. Poetry is often an exploration of the 'gaps' that we have to close to understand each other. The condensed nature of poetry forces the reader to confront the gaps in a way that is emotionally relevant. The poetry of Claire Wahmanholm is a very good example of this concept.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even with the off-kilter formatting of the eARC that I read, I could tell these poems are something special. In almost all these poems, nature appears as beautiful but betrays, transmitting danger and fear through the soil. It takes on almost human (and nefarious) characteristics, and the world is unsettled. I can't wait to see these in final copy.

Thanks to the publisher for showing me an early version. It came out November 13, 2018.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully wrought poetry that caused me to think on human suffering and its causes.

Favorite lines:

"We are precious tendrils of light. We may be a sun to someone. Why should we be utterly lost"

"In the first month of the year birds curdled the air."

"A pulling began from nowhere. Book bindings came unglued, hairline cracks cobwebbed the backs of our hands. Caught in this force we could not call by name, we waited."

"Grubby violet dusk. Everywhere, the tongue-tang of rust. [...] Now we clambered over toothless windowsills to land in the factory's hard concrete mouth."

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

'On the horizon, I see them
rising and setting like moons.
the world is very distant.
We know the humdrum immensity of space.
We know that our universe is merely a glimpse of the end.'
▫️"How I Dreamed There" from Wilder: Poems by Claire Wahmanholm, 2018.

If you like your #poetry with a dash of Hieronymus Bosch, a pinch of eschatology, and a smidge of after-Earth speculation, Wahmanholm is the poet for you.

Cosmic, exquisite, and bewildering.

In other words, I loved it.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gave me feelings from quiet loneliness, creepy apocalypse tension, to the beauty of nature left on its own. Recommend if your looking for this kind of poetry.

[Atsuko Ashlee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and dripping with dread, ash-filled mouths and scenes of our wastelands. Disturbing and candid.

[Paris (parisperusing) · Rating 5 out of 5]

On Earth I had been held, honeysuckled
...
I used to miss desire, but that was eons ago.
I used to miss the sound of my voice,
but that was before I pulled my name
from my throat like a pit and set fire
to the field of my face.
...
If I stumbled upon this place again, I would not know it.


Claire Wahmanholm’s WILDER is a woodland dreamscape, though the verses inside it — amassed of atoms, of sparks of memories — transcend the rules of time and mortality. It’s easy to envision the forest as the poet does — a galaxy and metaphor of its own. I really enjoyed the scattered form she uses in her poems, the planetary illustrations, her command over alliteration, like in “B,” an ode not only to bears but all endangered wildlife and humanity. I loved the etymology that appears so casually throughout this collection, the narration of an afterlife in “Where I Went Afterward” (quoted above) and so much more. This reminded me of Tracy K. Smith’s Pulitzer Prize-winning LIFE ON MARS, one of the best to be written.

Thank you Milkweed Editions for sending this gem, a perfect read for the season we’re in. **extended review forthcoming @ Paperback Paris

If you liked my review, feel free to follow me @parisperusing on Instagram.

[Doug Levandowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly remarkable, heartrending collection about loss and devastation through a sci-fi lens. That description doesn't do it justice, though. This is one of the most original, poignant collections I've ever read.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apocalyptic and haunting, these poems are like a fever dream of the end of humanity. The book is named after an archaic usage of the word "wilder," which as a verb means to lose one's way and become wild. Here, the wilderness is death and wrongness; natural images are connected with descriptions of rot and sickness. The opening poem, "Descent," uses imagery such as "whose faces are wild fields, and fruitless; / whose throats are peeled peaches, and voiceless." In other poems, the "birds curdled the air" and "the meadow unfolded before me, / a soft, uncrossable rot." The wilderness is not a fecund or lush place -- it is dead and dying. Many of the poems refer to children -- the speaker(s) as children, the children missing from the world. But there is no innocence in childhood, here -- the children's games and rhymes references in the second section point to a dark mythology, an innate violence in humanity that has been cultivated since childhood. And in the apocalyptic world, the children are missing, which means the hope for the future is missing; there is no exit from the state of the world, now.

The book is very consistent in tone, which made it a difficult read for me -- by the end of the book, a lot of the images, ideas, and language seemed repetitive. The poems blurred together. I appreciated it more on the second read after having gained some context, especially after I read the writer's notes and realized the "blown up" poems were erasures of Cosmos.

[Oakley C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The meadow, unfolded before me,
a soft, uncrossable rot

These two lines perfectly illustrate the unique drama and magic of this slim volume. Wilder is brimming with imagery while simultaneously affirming the necessity of sound, going so far in places to offer very clear (but rare) end rhyme, moments of blank verse, and playful alliteration. Where there is some weakness is in the basic structuring of the book itself. The alliterative poems are not exactly one after the other, but they are in such proximity as to almost fatigue the reader. However, the book ends with a veritable brick wall of prose works which not only neglected the much of the aforementioned sonic elements, but also genuinely weary the reader as it begins to feel like one imagistic but thoroughly dense meditation after another. Why not have these special case poems be interspersed throughout?

[Kate J · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach." The physical copy I bought did not have a summary, so to read this was really helpful.
I was drawn to this book because of the author's writing style. I find some poets are too simplistic, while others are too complex, but Wahmanholm created beautiful imagery with lyrical writing that didn't over-complicate.
Someone else captured the feeling I also got from reading this:
"Gave me feelings from quiet loneliness, creepy apocalypse tension, to the beauty of nature left on its own. Recommend if your looking for this kind of poetry."

"The meadow unfolded before me,
a soft, uncrossable rot.

I tore myself in two along my spine and sent half of me
into the night to see if I would make it through"

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Meltwater (2023) is liquid then Wilder (2018) is solid. Water and rock. River and rust. Two complimentary yet contrasting collections, where erasures and science are intertwined with alliteration and constraint, abecedarians and surrealism. I read both of these collections within 48 hours of each other so they feel like sequels, like two bleeding, breathing things. Mysterious and magical and haunting and real.

[DeeDee · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Such an eerily beautiful collection.

Some of my favorites:
"W"
"The Witch"
"D"
"Beginning"
"Still the Sea"
"Bog Body"
"Relaxation Tape" series

**Thanks to Milkweed Editions and Edelweiss for providing this DRC in exchange for an honest review

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a strange-glorious book. One I want to return to as I felt it was a bit slippery at first and I want to figure out why. As I kept reading, I got further enmeshed in this alien-ish world Wahmanholm invents. Plus who doesn't love erasure poems based on Sagan texts?

[Whatcha Reading Heather? · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this might be the most cinematically written poetry collection that I’ve ever read. Thought-provoking without being pretentious with a plot that is entertaining enough that you’ll get lost in the words.

[Brooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

If The Road were written as poetry with Tim Burton giving creative direction, it would be this book.

[Nick Pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quality and so of the moment, but daaaaaaark

[Tara Betts]

Some interesting play with formal constraint and white space in a post-apocalyptic setting.

[luna rey hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorite poem: B

“For how bulletins are bursting with bodies of brown bears and the alphabet is just beginning.”

[Tom Wein · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first two thirds of this left little mark, but the final section contains some of the bleakest poems of catastrophe I’ve ever known. Notable, though not much fun!

[Violeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claire Wahmanholm writes imagined ends of the world with vertiginous fever dream razored beauty. This collection sings out in elegy and warning.

[Lizette · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The wind reminds our bodies how to beg”.

[miyu · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 ⭐️

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

"G is the groundwater and the guts, the groan growing inside of us."

[Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am still a rather unschooled reader of poetry, rarely going out of my way to check it out, and thus, not very knowledgeable about the styles and ideas of the form. This is unfortunate, as when I do happen to read some poetry, oftentimes I find myself unequipped to explain just how entrancing it is to me. In a way, poetry seems ideal for expressing feelings and ideas, conveying a certain mood or atmosphere that would be impossible in prose, an extremely compelling voice that I’d like to see more of. This was especially true of Claire Wahmanholm’s collection, Wilder.

My eye was drawn to this book at the library due to its title, which has a deeply personal meaning to me, and the poetry inside surprised me with its strong sense of melancholy and change. Ominous, beautiful, and mysterious, Wahmanholm’s words strongly evoke the cycles of the natural world, as well as a kind of post apocalyptic imagery that resonates in today’s climate. I really appreciate how Wilder cultivates these feelings so well, so evocatively. I only wish I had more of a toolkit to parse what I found so effective in her writing and how poetry can be so uniquely suited for this.