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Open Books: Event Archive
April 13, 2006 07:30 PM
JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON
Joshua Marie Wilkinson returns to his hometown to read from Lug Your
Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk ($16 University of Iowa), which
received the 2005 Iowa Poetry Prize. Subtitled "A Poem in Fragments," this
intriguingly dream-like volume is disorienting and familiar, as if we looked
through a swinging door. Though gentle in tone, the poems carry an awareness
of transgression, of damage -- "A moonlight like gauze, no -- // of course
it's not, but wouldn't we / want it to be so? / As if that little glow tore
open a hole / in your arm & somebody / bandaged you softly up?" Among Mr.
Wilkinson's influences are painters and filmmakers, and his fragments are
often strikingly and unusually visual -- "A little bit of Christmas in your
eyes, / stuck to your red lips," and, "Dusk like / your doctor's wooden
teeth." Fragments though this work may be, their gatherer has made from them
something whole.
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