Troy, Michigan
Wendy S. Walters
Praise for Troy, Michigan
If to imagine the city is to imagine the human psyche, as it is in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, then Wendy S. Walters’ Troy, Michigan approximates a psyche flattened by middle class desires, racist anxieties, and inexplicably horrifying violence. Walters’ quiet, haunting utterances are beautifully precise mappings of the measure of a city’s weight and thereby its dark (or darkened) soul. In the wake of reading, I am reminded of Kipling’s refrain, “Lest we forget”—a warning, a kind of boogeyman emergent from a landscape’s shiny surface. Walters’ Troy, Michigan simply could not be better.
—Dawn Lundy Martin
Troy, Michigan is a maximalist’s compelling note to self. Ethnography, history, memoir, and the troubled gaps between them drive Wendy S. Walters’ sustained critique of the stable (writing) self via that other chimera of stability: the “desire / for safety” that is the story of the American suburb.
—Anna Moschovakis
In Wendy S. Walters’ Troy, Michigan, a sonnet is equal parts literary and geographical inheritance, one whose rhetorical force, as this collection reveals with each poem, elegantly crowns and transforms personal and historical crises. With enormous associative velocity, Walters gentrifies and reimagines confession and invention, a performance of language that is utterly captivating and humane.
—Major Jackson
About the Author
Wendy S. Walters is the author of a book of poems, Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (2009) and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles (2005) both published by Palm Press. Her poetry has been recognized with residency fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell, and Yaddo, and in 2011 she was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry. Walters’s work appears in Fence, Callaloo, Bookforum, The Iowa Review, and Harper’s Magazine. She is Associate Professor of Poetry in the Department of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of The New School University.
Additional Links
wendyswalters.com
New School faculty page
Walters on Adrienne Rich, VIDA Blog
Poem by Walters, Drunken Boat 18
Praise for Troy, Michigan
If to imagine the city is to imagine the human psyche, as it is in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, then Wendy S. Walters’ Troy, Michigan approximates a psyche flattened by middle class desires, racist anxieties, and inexplicably horrifying violence. Walters’ quiet, haunting utterances are beautifully precise mappings of the measure of a city’s weight and thereby its dark (or darkened) soul. In the wake of reading, I am reminded of Kipling’s refrain, “Lest we forget”—a warning, a kind of boogeyman emergent from a landscape’s shiny surface. Walters’ Troy, Michigan simply could not be better.
—Dawn Lundy Martin
Troy, Michigan is a maximalist’s compelling note to self. Ethnography, history, memoir, and the troubled gaps between them drive Wendy S. Walters’ sustained critique of the stable (writing) self via that other chimera of stability: the “desire / for safety” that is the story of the American suburb.
—Anna Moschovakis
In Wendy S. Walters’ Troy, Michigan, a sonnet is equal parts literary and geographical inheritance, one whose rhetorical force, as this collection reveals with each poem, elegantly crowns and transforms personal and historical crises. With enormous associative velocity, Walters gentrifies and reimagines confession and invention, a performance of language that is utterly captivating and humane.
—Major Jackson
About the Author
Wendy S. Walters is the author of a book of poems, Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (2009) and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles (2005) both published by Palm Press. Her poetry has been recognized with residency fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell, and Yaddo, and in 2011 she was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry. Walters’s work appears in Fence, Callaloo, Bookforum, The Iowa Review, and Harper’s Magazine. She is Associate Professor of Poetry in the Department of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of The New School University.
Additional Links
wendyswalters.com
New School faculty page
Walters on Adrienne Rich, VIDA Blog
Poem by Walters, Drunken Boat 18
