God of Nothingness

by Mark Wunderlich

Overview

A magnificent book of hope and resolve written out of profound losses, by award-winning poet Mark Wunderlich

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644451380
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
Sales rank:	945,775
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Mark Wunderlich is the author of The Anchorage, which won the 1999 Lambda Literary Award. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

I.

Wunderlich 5

A Driftless Son 7

Ha Ha Little Hunchback 8

Haunted House 10

Gone Is Gone 12

Wooden Box 14

Once Forgotten 16

Shanty 17

Chateau on an Island in a Lake 18

The Prodigal 19

Visitation 21

First, Chill 23

Cuthbert 25

II.

My Night with Jeffrey Dahmer 29

God of Nothingness 31

The Son I'll Never Have 33

Death of a Cat 34

Elegy for a Hanged Boy 37

III.

The Indifference of Horses 41

Portrait of Mary Magdalene 44

Fragment of St. Julian 47

Ice Man 48

Museum of Bees 50

Freelove, Discarnate 52

Proposition 54

Unpainted Pictures 56

The Beast of Bray Road 57

The Bats 60

Five Cold Stories 61

IV.

On the Autobiographical Impulse 69

Midsummer 77

To Whom It May Concern: 79

Notes 81

Acknowledgments 83

Editorial Reviews

God of Nothingness is a folkloric investigation into death and its resounding implications on our humanity and significance.”—The Arkansas International

“[God of Nothingness is] Mark Wunderlich’s . . . best collection of poems. . . . He makes lines as warm and clean as the sunlit pine floors upon which his cat napped.”—Commonweal

“The superb fourth collection from Wunderlich disarms with its directness, humor, and pathos.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Wunderlich . . . strikes a note of elegiac unease [in God of Nothingness]. . . . The poem ‘My Night with Jeffrey Dahmer,’ as chilling as its title, owes much of its power to the poet’s ability to orchestrate a suspensefully blended tone of dread and desire.”—Library Journal

“Erotic, folkloric, elegiac, philosophic, aesthetic, lyric, queer and rural and utterly haunted (but without the usual messiness of haunting), Wunderlich transcends downward and takes us with him. . . . I am in love with The God of Nothingness, which is permeated, it turns out, with a majestic somethingness.”—Diane Seuss

“Mark Wunderlich’s poems are alarmingly wise, lyrically charged, and built out of an almost otherworldly clarity. . . . Wunderlich makes an argument not for beauty but for a clear-eyed resilience. God of Nothingness is a book that is as devastating as it is life-affirming, a weapon that both wounds and saves.”—Ada Limón

From the Publisher

03/01/2021

"The difference between the living and the dead is mostly one of conjugation," writes Wunderlich, an apt pun suggesting not only the temporal sense of conjugation but the sexual frankness that characterized the poet's early work. In a departure from the prayerful georgics of his last collection (2013's The Earth Avails), Wunderlich here strikes a note of elegiac unease ("I have secretly admired the first hard frost / killing the garden, putting an end / to its many failures"), turning his concern to the complex nature of personal identity ("On the Autobiographical Impulse") and how "the harder arrangements of affection" persist despite the erasures of mortality. His trademark rural imagery is again a constant, only it's more Wisconsin Gothic (deer "spook and shadow in the pines," bats "chop and hazard through the sky") than American idyll. The poem "My Night with Jeffrey Dahmer," as chilling as its title, owes much of its power to the poet's ability to orchestrate a suspensefully blended tone of dread and desire. VERDICT Rising from wells of loss and loneliness ("My future is the only future"), Wunderlich's poems may seem harsh, even bitter, but their authentic, wounded humanity is no less compelling for that.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal