Dear Wallace

“Part homage, part rebuke, part domestic cri de coeur, Dear Wallace levels a nervy, philosophical critique at the myth of male genius and the American dream. Supreme fictions be damned. Here are notes toward a subversive, feminist reality.”—Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book
“With one part whimsy, one part despair, and a snogger of wry wit, Choffel drops us into the most halcyon disturbance ever to wake the dead. Here are the residues of our times: grief, parental exhaustion, a proclivity to avoid pants, proffered with restraint and tonal finesse to match her interlocutor, Wallace Stevens. From a domestic abyss that is gritty and abiding, these poems call to us, and with the grace of a gravedigger’s ladder, deliver us altered onto the turned earth, blinking.”—Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, author of Her Read
“In her daring, necessary Dear Wallace, poet Julie Choffel insists, ‘what people don’t realize is / form is personal.’ These urgent poems enact the realization that the personal is never settled but needs to be discovered anew, line by line. For Choffel, poetry is not the cry but rather the hope laden in the occasion of our humanity. Her work is what listening sounds like.”—Richard Deming, author of This Exquisite Loneliness