For philosopher Michel Foucault, heterotopia designates a real or imagined space of escape, transformation, or revelation. In Lesley Wheeler's prizewinning second collection, the heterotopia is Liverpool, England, during the middle of the twentieth century--a time and place defined by the Blitz and the privations that followed. Her imaginary Liverpool, however, has a complicated relationship to the real city and to her own life in the United States: it makes visible what was gained and lost in the transition from poverty to prosperity, from oral culture to print overload.
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During a time when so many collections of verse seem tonally and formally monochromatic, it's especially refreshing to encounter a writer who works with such considerable facility in several different modes--deeply felt personal lyrics, challenging sonnet sequences, and documentary-historical poems of intelligence and depth. What's more, these various concerns and approaches not only complement one another, but seem inextricably linked. Heterotopia is a collection of unusual distinction. ----David Wojahn, contest judge
'No elegies here,' Lesley Wheeler writes in this vital collection. And vital it is: quick in its blood with the inherited memory of the poet's foremothers and Wheeler's own dexterous artistry. Heterotopia is a circular, recursive book; it moves anti-clockwise against the hard, forward push of time to a historical Liverpool populated with the people who preceded her, people for whom leggy pansies, black puddings, petrol bombs, skeptical birds, sooty fireplaces, and the unmistaken, irrepressible smell of wet wool were commonplace. For an instant master class in craft, turn to the enviable fourteen-sonnet crown at the book's geographic center, The Calderstones. 'Everything happened long / ago, in somebody else's heart,' she writes. These are non-ironic poems, focused outside of the self. There's simply no narcissism here. Only craft and deep, deep care. ----Jill Alexander Essbaum
With acute formal awareness, Lesley Wheeler makes urgent and undeniably present the sedimentary language of an inherited past . . . This work fuses lyrical invention with the 'blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin world of memory'--the poems richly drawn intermixtures of narrative and place. -- --Claudia Emerson
'No elegies here,' Lesley Wheeler writes in this vital collection. And vital it is: quick in its blood with the inherited memory of the poet's foremothers and Wheeler's own dexterous artistry. Heterotopia is a circular, recursive book; it moves anti-clockwise against the hard, forward push of time to a historical Liverpool populated with the people who preceded her, people for whom leggy pansies, black puddings, petrol bombs, skeptical birds, sooty fireplaces, and the unmistaken, irrepressible smell of wet wool were commonplace. For an instant master class in craft, turn to the enviable fourteen-sonnet crown at the book's geographic center, The Calderstones. 'Everything happened long / ago, in somebody else's heart,' she writes. These are non-ironic poems, focused outside of the self. There's simply no narcissism here. Only craft and deep, deep care. ----Jill Alexander Essbaum
With acute formal awareness, Lesley Wheeler makes urgent and undeniably present the sedimentary language of an inherited past . . . This work fuses lyrical invention with the 'blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin world of memory'--the poems richly drawn intermixtures of narrative and place. ----Claudia Emerson
'No elegies here,' Lesley Wheeler writes in this vital collection. And vital it is: quick in its blood with the inherited memory of the poet's foremothers and Wheeler's own dexterous artistry. Heterotopia is a circular, recursive book; it moves anti-clockwise against the hard, forward push of time to a historical Liverpool populated with the people who preceded her, people for whom leggy pansies, black puddings, petrol bombs, skeptical birds, sooty fireplaces, and the unmistaken, irrepressible smell of wet wool were commonplace. For an instant master class in craft, turn to the enviable fourteen-sonnet crown at the book's geographic center, The Calderstones. 'Everything happened long / ago, in somebody else's heart,' she writes. These are non-ironic poems, focused outside of the self. There's simply no narcissism here. Only craft and deep, deep care. ----Jill Alexander Essbaum
With acute formal awareness, Lesley Wheeler makes urgent and undeniably present the sedimentary language of an inherited past . . . This work fuses lyrical invention with the 'blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin world of memory'--the poems richly drawn intermixtures of narrative and place. -- --Claudia Emerson
'No elegies here,' Lesley Wheeler writes in this vital collection. And vital it is: quick in its blood with the inherited memory of the poet's foremothers and Wheeler's own dexterous artistry. Heterotopia is a circular, recursive book; it moves anti-clockwise against the hard, forward push of time to a historical Liverpool populated with the people who preceded her, people for whom leggy pansies, black puddings, petrol bombs, skeptical birds, sooty fireplaces, and the unmistaken, irrepressible smell of wet wool were commonplace. For an instant master class in craft, turn to the enviable fourteen-sonnet crown at the book's geographic center, The Calderstones. 'Everything happened long / ago, in somebody else's heart,' she writes. These are non-ironic poems, focused outside of the self. There's simply no narcissism here. Only craft and deep, deep care. ----Jill Alexander Essbaum
With acute formal awareness, Lesley Wheeler makes urgent and undeniably present the sedimentary language of an inherited past . . . This work fuses lyrical invention with the 'blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin world of memory'--the poems richly drawn intermixtures of narrative and place. ----Claudia Emerson
About the Author
Lesley Wheeler is the author of Heathen, Voicing American Poetry, and other books; she co-edited the anthology Letters to the World with Moira Richards and Rosemary Starace. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Slate, and Prairie Schooner. She is Professor of English at Washington and Lee University and lives in Lexington, Virginia.
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Lesley Wheeler is a poet and scholar who teaches at Washington and Lee University. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and other sources, and her poetry appears in many journals, including Slate, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in Lexington, Virginia with her spouse, writer Chris Gavaler, and their two children.
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