Spirit Cabinet

A spirit cabinet, for the Shakers, was a sort of stage through which the other world might speak. David Wojahn's ferocious poems are 'spirit cabinets' in which appear the raging ghosts of public and private history. His searing, harrowed book portrays a nearly ruined world lit by a glimmer of tenderness, and by the corrective perspectives of irony and self-awareness. - Mark Doty ""With an Old Testament wrath and a New Testament forgiveness, Wojahn charts the inscriptions and erasures of both voices and cultures, weaving his own magic carpet to guide us above the confusion and toward any clarity, any wisdom which still might be left to us. With his autobiographical tour de force, 'Crayola,' Wojahn spins the wild, kaleidoscopic roulette wheel of his own life, melding - among others - the voices of antiquity and prophecy with the erotic balloons of comic books."" - David St. John