It Is If I Speak

New poems from the most iconoclastic poet of his generation.

In the epigraph to Joe Wenderoth’s new volume of poetry, a herdsman, exhorted by Oedipus to speak the truth, replies “It is if I speak that I will be destroyed.”

Wenderoth’s poetry is sparse, nihilistic ― and sometimes witty. Publishers Weekly wrote that, “Like Stevens, Wenderoth has a passion for philosophical ideas; at the same time he follows Williams’ no ideas but in things. The result is poetry that is intellectually charged but whose final fidelity is to the senses.” His new book has the dignity of a sincere and ferocious despair. In the narratives of these poems, “owing is all that really happens,” and lives are shaped by the refusal to “sink dumbly into tolerance of a spectacle.”