UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Poems

Book Jacket: "The Anchorage" by M. Wunderlich

Mark Wunderlich

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Poetry

An arresting and finely crafted book of poetry

In this debut collection, Mark Wunderlich creates a central metaphor of the body as anchor for the soul—but it is a body in peril, one set in motion through the landscape of desire. In poems located in New York's summer streets, in the barren snowfields of Wisconsin, and along stretches of Cape Cod's open shoreline, the lover speaks to the beloved in the form of lyrical missives, arguments, and intimate monologues. The poems converse with each other; images repeat and echo in an effect that is strange and beautiful. Uniting the collection is an original and consistent voice—one that has found a hard won stance against the haphazard and negotiates with what is needful and sufficient.

The Anchorage is a collection of love poems for the end of the millennium and takes as its subjects the dichotomies of love and illness, the urban and the rural, homosexual desire and familial tension. Wunderlich faces the complexities of contemporary life through poems that are both tender and striving and that leave the reader with an image of the body as a door through which one can transcend the suffering of the world.

"The last time I was so struck as I am now reading Mark Wunderlich's new collection of poems, I was gazing at an immense Greek vase, on whose elegantly fired red and black surface were warriors, at once flaunting and shielding their nakedness, struggling with their fates, or crushed by them in eerily erotic attitudes. The Anchorage bravely takes up the raw mess of desire and pain, the cold ache of longing and loss, and in sleek and searing poems exposes the way we live now to the larger powers of the racing heart and the radiant imagination. This is a scary, sad, ecstatic, astonishing book—and a brilliant debut."

J. D. McClatchy

Mark Wunderlich is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Winner of the 1997 Writers at Work Poetry Fellowship, he is also the recipient of a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Poetry / Gay and Lesbian Studies
72 pp.
LC 98-53493
$19.95t cloth, ISBN 1-55849-200-3

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