Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments (Iowa Poetry Prize) [Paperback]

Joshua Marie Wilkinson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Iowa Poetry Prize | Publication Date: April 1, 2006

Drawing from the paintings of Susan Rothenberg, Gwyneth Scally, and Eric Fischl as well as from the photography of Allison Maletz, Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book-length poem written in small fragments. Comprised of seven sections, the poem is formed as much by the poet’s travels through Turkey, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe as it is by the movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Bill Morrison. The painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here alongside whispers of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book of cinematic images and fragments, of small stories overheard and quickly abandoned, of hidden letters and phone booths, and of ghosts who return with questions.

Born and raised in Seattle’s Haller Lake neighborhood, Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of one other book of poetry, Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms, and the chapbook A Ghost as King of the Rabbits. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and an MA in film studies from University College Dublin. Presently he lives in Denver, Colorado, where he is pursuing his doctorate in English and creative writing and completing his first film.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The dreamer is not quite asleep and so his conscious seeks reason at its most partial, least impartial. Thus, in Joshua Marie Wilkinson's collection, what initially appears fragmentary is really a subversive precision. What lures with its charms becomes strange and volatile: 'Home, almost, at / least where words cut your lip & I spoke / you together & then back apart.' Come: enter beguiled and leave haunted, where Wilkinson acts as a graceful thief---he steals his own disappearance and is the cunning agent of his own chimerical resurgence.”---Elizabeth Robinson, author of Apprehend

“The epigraph to Wilkinson's stunning new book promises a light in which 'everything is meant for you / And nothing need be explained.' He gives us entry into a logbook full of riven epiphanies, ungettable coherences, ever-interrupted plots, and stabbing moments of visual, narrative, and emotional clarity. His obliquities and hauntingly urgent interrogations reinvent time, perception, and story and cast us into dusks of logic with brilliant illumination.”---Bruce Beasley

About the Author

Born and raised in Seattle's Haller Lake neighborhood, Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of one other book of poetry, Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms, and the chapbook A Ghost as King of the Rabbits. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and an MA in film studies from University College Dublin. Presently he lives in Denver, Colorado, where he is pursuing his doctorate in English and creative writing and completing his first film.

Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press (April 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0877459819
• ISBN-13: 978-0877459811
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6.2 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,018,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born and raised in Seattle, Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of two book-length poems, including Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk. His most recent works are The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth, Selenography (with Polaroids by Tim Rutili), and Poets on Teaching. With Solan Jensen, he directed a tour documentary about the band Califone entitled Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape. He lives in Tucson and teaches in the MFA program at University of Arizona.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From Dusk to Dawn, April 3, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments (Iowa Poetry Prize) (Paperback)

I think "Lug" must stand for "lugubrious," but Joshua Wilkinson's new book is at any rate some sort of soul-changing experience, particularly for those with a fondness for the works of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The scary monsters they disclose, the secrets from which their slightly later US contemporaries Susan Rothenberg and Eric Fischl drew 1980s neo-figuration, fascinate this young, upcoming poet, even though, as the old saying goes, "You can't go home again." Again and again, Mr. Wilkinson shows us the 2006 version of serial poems that zone in on one subject, or topic, and then flit off at the first sign of closure, too anguished to find even the momentary rest of a rhyme.

As FE Smith once wrote, "The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords." Wilkinson's blade is sharp and his heart is not only stout but wide in compass. His fragmented poem drips with feeling, gathering up glimpses of the absurd and the understated in many countries round the globe. Not for nothing has he travelled to many places, and how refreshing it is to come upon a poet so concerned with European matters, not only those of an aesthetic nature, but of a geopolitical bent as well. In "The Bowling Alley's Most Beautiful Thief" we revisit not only his eroticized penchant for thievery (his totem animal should be the magpie) but we see troubling instances of the sort of institutionalized torture Amnesty International reports on but, of course, poets knew about it all along: "Triangulated position of girl thieves/ in the crossbeams, in the horizontal rafters./ Pulleys & ropes across, clicked into their bellies."

There are real bodies everywhere in the book, as the title points out. "Until you unstick the kite from the oak's branches./ /Until your name finds you in another body." And yet at the same time there's a drive away from the body and into a lyric mist, a confusion between realms ("Christmas or Boxing Day," wonders the bicoastal narrator, as though unable to distinguish the date.) "A duck perched on my oar, proof of my/ absence."

At the end of the book there's a list of previous winners of the Iowa Poetry Prize. That list is more chilling than a visit to the Winchester Mystery House. Read it and shiver for the vanity of earthly delights. These poets, who must have thought that their names and works would now live forever, form a gallery of has beens and never made its, with a few notable exceptions who are indeed among my closest friends