Meme

Acclaimed poet Susan Wheeler, whose last individual collection predicted the spiritual losses of the economic collapse, turns her attention to the most intimate of subjects: the absence or loss of love. A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation; examples of memes, Richard Dawkins wrote, are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. What could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children?

Wheeler reconstructs her mother's voice--down to its cynicism and its mid twentieth-century midwestern vernacular--in The Maud Poems, a voice that takes a more aggressive, vituperative turn in The Devil--or--The Introjects. In the book's third long sequence, a generational inheritance feeds cultural transmission in The Split. A set of variations on losses and break-ups--wildly, darkly funny throughout and, in places, devastatingly sad--The Split brings Wheeler's lauded inventiveness, wit, and insight to the profound loss of love. One read, and the meme Should I stay or should I go? will be altered in your head forever.