Thieve

by Joe Wilkins

Joe Wilkins, winner of the Oregon Book Award and the High Plains Book Award, returns with his fourth book of poetry, Thieve, his most ambitious collection yet.
Thieve is a pointed, political book, though the politics here are local, particular, physically felt. The central sequence of poems—all subtitled "Poem against the Crumbling of the Republic"—was written in direct response to the poet's own transition from rural poverty to coastal liberal comfort, as well as the presidential election of 2016, which brought to the national consciousness the grave division in American society between urban and rural people. Thieve, then, is a poetic attempt to speak across that chasm.
Thieve also interrogates chasms and barriers between the human and the natural, the present and the past, the parent and the child, between what is earned and what by grace is given.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2019

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.