Whoop and Shush

Under the spell of the language and its restless repetitions and rhythms, these poems surprise with unexpected turns and shifts, associations and speculations. Jeff Baker reminds us that it is words that beget the whoop and shush of worlds, and sing us back into the strangeness of being. -- Dorianne Laux

Winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2013

Whoop & Shush is a book of poems obsessed with the ways we are bound, and bound together, by our language. Whether these poems are re-envisioning a childhood in the Appalachians of East Tennessee, calling out to Cherokee ancestors who no longer populate a lost homeland, or are giving new voice to a range of characters in surprising ways (Shakespeare’s Caliban show’s up at the US Navy’s nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll and a deceased Elvis speaks from the afterlife), the central obsession with how language can strike notes both high and low remains. Whoop & Shush calls out from worlds where words carry a physicality of the intensely observed but do not hesitate to sing their way, through metaphor, toward places where strange wonders counterbalance the starkly real.