I've had a little bit of a cold.
So if I have a sudden fit of coughing, please forgive me.
[LAUGHTER]
And maybe I'll leave the room and [INAUDIBLE]..
Josh Marie Wilkinson is the author
of five books of poetry most recently Selenography.
He has edited two anthologies for University of Iowa Press
including Poets On Teaching.
And he has just completed his first feature length film
a tour documentary about the band Califone.
He lives in Chicago where he is an assistant professor
at Loyola University.
He graduated from University of Arizona Creative Writing MFA
program in 2002.
Wilkinson's poetry is lyric, imagistic, cryptic yet
always sincere, a perhaps rare quality in contemporary poets.
Compressed without excess of any kind,
Wilkinson's work is obsessed with visual art.
This layering of multiple artistic dimensions
works to create a transformative lens for the reader.
Wilkinson has created a kind of new language
in which readers must wrap themselves
in order to inhabit his world.
In his latest book Selenography, the first book in the No Volta
pentalogy.
Wilkinson juxtaposes his poems with Polaroids
taken by the artist Tim Rutili depicting moments
like a small plane crash, a graffitied bathroom, legs,
a hung skeleton, a lone crow.
These images complement the silences hollowed out
by the poems to create an atmosphere of utter stillness.
Selenography literally meaning lunar geography
feels as though it is as one of the poems
suggests, a storybook collecting our ends.
The landscapes are ours and not ours.
They're human and not human.
They are haunted by ghosts of the past and future.
What little life exists here is merely the fleeting specter
of the present.
The last section of Selenography invokes Samuel Beckett.
Let me hear nothing of the moon.
In my night there is no moon.
And if I speak of the stars it is by mistake.
It is as though the world has come unglued.
The force that holds the Earth together the moon, is gone.
The book ends on a paradoxical quandary, a speaker
without a way forward.
There is no love without strangers
in the street with their murmuring like wires.
A knock at the wall, a chalk line to cross
says the boy with the trapdoor in his eye.
I have a fold I have no followable path.
Please help me welcome Josh Marie Wilkinson.
[APPLAUSE]