Redmouth

by Claire Wahmanholm

Poetry. "Claire Wahmanholm's book REDMOUTH is grief-stricken. But how does the poet make grief so beautiful? Who knew the language of grief could be stricken itself with the language of beauty? Here the deer have disappeared but when the speaker closes her eyes, she 'can see them / licking the coats of their fawns, anchoring / their spots to their fur to their bodies to the forest floor.' There's simply no doubt that Wahmanholm is a poet because language is the center of all of her work, whether it is describing a decayed world where 'mountains have unraveled into sand' to the stripping away and lifting out of language in the equally stunning erasures sprinkled throughout this book. Yes, darkness razors across these poems, but what comes out of the experience of reading is beauty. I don't know many poets today who can write such beauty into such devastation: 'The children's hair lies dewy on the hillocks of their heads / until shreds like cornsilk come off in the breeze.' Gorgeously rendered, devastatingly stunning."--Victoria Chang

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

Published October 29, 2019

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

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never seen grief and grieving brought to the page like this. Each poem is a marvel of sound and images, including erasures of Virgil and Theocritus. The collection as a whole is woven around--among other things--red, redmouth, red snow (from algea), phenomena from astronomy and physics, and free associations thereof, loosely enough to always leave room for a reader's own associations. Its five parts (each headed by a slowly disappearing/blurring O) move spiral-like inward and outward, a movement underlined by brilliantly placed repetitions, be those words or sounds. Grief as a place in language and sound, and at once a place so utterly and devastatingly alive. The verb refracted like light hitting a prism.

[Abigail Zimmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atmospheric poems and a solitary journey into a strange and hard land. These poems follow the arc of grief, nonspecific, with signs of an impending cold, fallow nights, a landscape preparing for hibernation and then a thaw.

[Celinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the best lyric poetry out there. Stunning.

[Michelle Hyatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't like as much as her first book, but she's still a next level poet. Her subject matter is crazy

[Shilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What would / it do, / that bird-- / unblue, unselved, / blanched on / winter's branch, / absent against/ its white? / Without you, / I'm only / the idea / of flight."

[Sarah Slansky Marcue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wahmanholms poetry is meant to be felt. She includes a variety of forms that have individual purpose in their structuring. Each new line is unexpected and filled with metaphors and intentional, unexpected concrete imagery.