In Abeyance

With this new book of sedimented lyric, John Wilkinson’s poetry enters a terrain of creatures flattened in shale, in flat screen and in digital code. If Silicon Valley would repopulate Jurassic Park and defeat death, Wilkinson’s poetry would make actual what slides past in the disregarded day, whether the flattening of a city or the return of seasonal blossom. This poetry swells dry roots; it breaches the total coverage that flatlines the heart’s response, through its urgent and generous rhythms. “Of poets now writing in English, [Wilkinson] is the freest and most elusive-on-principle, the most capable of pulling out the language blade and using it.” —Calvin Bedient