The Spectral Wilderness (Wick Poetry First Book)
by Oliver Bendorf
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Winner of the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Mark Doty, Judge "It's a joy...to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender... Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category." -Mark Doty, from the Foreword show more "Bendorf's collection indeed opens the door to a spectral wilderness, an otherworldly pastoral, a queer ecology endlessly transformed by possibility, grief, and the unruly wanting of our names and bodies. Stunningly lyrical and beautifully theoretical, The Spectral Wildernessis an invitation one cannot turn down; the book calls us to travel with Bendorf, to study the topography of becoming because "what we used to be matters" in the way that language matters-however fleeting, however mistaken, however contradictory it might be." -Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography "What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf's poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. 'Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open, ' he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside. The Spectral Wildernessis a wonderful book." -Ross Gay, author of Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down show lessTags
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Oliver Bendorf is a poet and painter from Iowa. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin Madison, Where he is currently studying to be a librarian. His work has been anthologized in Best New Poets and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics.
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