Meme

"There is no knack for grief," writes Wheeler (Assorted Poems), but her far-reaching experimentation suggests that--through language--she's seeking one. Three wild sequences struggling with loss comprise this volume: In "The Maud Poems," a daughter attempts to make sense of a mother's language rife with idioms and clichés by collaging stanzas of the poet's own lyric voice ("In the sepulcher where the mother lay/ at last some sleep to gain,/ Hannah helped me carve the oak/ into granite with her cane") between nagging bursts ("Don't come in here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed expecting us to give you more"). The second sequence, "The Devil--or--The Introjects" remixes this vernacular with narrative in dense--sometimes opaque--units. The last is also the most stirring sequence: "The Split" recounts disaster that "doubles at the slightest slight" through slippery lines that reveal masterful dexterity without compromising meaning. "Such is the state of our poetry caught in my throat on its way/ to my mouth, why not do everything// but of course we do nothing" she writes. Wheeler's ambitious new book comes closer to doing everything--much closer--and we are left awed at Wheeler's audacity."--Publishers Weekly

"In Meme, the traditional elegy dissolves into excited bursts of imitated idiomatic speech interwoven with writing from a different register-the coolly removed, self-insightful lyric. That the elaborately constructed edifice that is personality can be reconstructed with such fascinating economy and delightful indirection is amazing. These poems are pure poetic genius."-Mary Jo Bang, author, The Bride of E

"Meme is a haunted work. We are ushered in by the disembodied voice of a mother figure, scolding and teasing in the time-stamped slang of past decades. The anachronism is both funny and terribly sad. 'Don't come in here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,' the voice says. And it turns out that's fair warning. This cracked Virgil leads us into a consciously Dantean underworld ('Had you entered the thicket in darkness / . . . Had you been mid-life, not in haze but in crisis?'). Wheeler has created a total (and to me terrifying) linguistic environment in which hell is the introjected voices of other people, the hungry ghosts of our recent past."-Rae Armantrout, author, Money Shot

Praise for previous books:

"Wheeler accomplishes something no one has done before, bringing all her interests and influences together to make poems that reflect an America no one else has seen . . . of how love in America might work: we never get enough, and . . . what we need is distraction, busywork, stuff to consume."-Craig Morgan Teicher, Yale Review

"As the years and books mount, Wheeler's verse feels increasingly grounded, without sacrificing rhetorical force."-Boston Review