Synopses & Reviews
That Winter the Wolf Came is written for this era of global struggle. It finds its ferment at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Its feminist and celebratory energy is fueled by street protests and their shattered windows. Amid oil spills and austerity measures and shore birds and a child holding its mothers hand and hissing teargas canisters, it reminds us exactly what we must fight to defend with a wild ferocity, and what were up against.
"In her poems, love does not resist the world beyond; love lets it in. Politics demands feeling rather than denuding it." Los Angeles Review of Books
"Geography, economics, ecology, hydrology, local and international history; repetition, flat limited diction, lengthy chant; intersections of incompatible discourses, such as a field biologists checklist plus memoir, medical record plus ode, incantation plus site report: Spahr draws on these resources and procedures to make poems that feel like bizarre, careful essays, and essays that feel like sad, extended poems." The Nation
"...a work of crisp wit, bizarre conjunctions and ultimately enduring moral authority." Publishers Weekly
Excerpt:
It was Non-Revolution. Or it was me. Or it was Non-Revolution and me. I was unsure what it really was. Maybe it was my thoughts. My thoughts at one minute about Non-Revolution. About the smell of Non-Revolution. Sweat, urine, sage, pot, rotting food, hay, all mixed together. Perhaps about Non-Revolutions body. I am sure I am not the only one who has thought it exceptional, but I am also just as sure that by the standards of bodies, Non-Revolutions is fine but not exceptional. That is the point. That is why Non-Revolution is called Non-Revolution, why they have revolution as a possibility in their name but it is a modified and thus negated possibility so as to suggest they are possibly neither good nor fucked. Still something about Non-Revolutions smell and body had gotten into me.
Synopsis
Renewed poetry of struggle at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophefeminist, ferocious, and finally celebratory.
Synopsis
That Winter the Wolf Came is a poetry written for this era of global struggle. It finds its ferment at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe such as the carbon catastrophes of Deepwater Horizon and the burning Kuwaiti oilfields. And it finds its feminist, ferocious, and finally celebratory energy in the example of the street protests of Oakland, California, and elsewhere.
Juliana Spahr is a writer of literature, a literary critic, a shaper of literary communities through editing, and a relentless collaborator. She currently teaches people how to write poetry at Mills College. Her most recent book, Army of Lovers (City Lights Publishers, 2014), was written with David Buuck.
About the Author
Juliana Spahr: Juliana Spahr is a writer of literature, a literary critic, a shaper of literary communities through editing, and a relentless collaborator. She currently teaches people how to write poetry at Mills College. Her most recent book
Army of Lovers (City Lights, 2014), was written with David Buuck. It tells the story of two friends who are trying to figure out why they continue to write poetry in a time of war and ecological collapse. Her first book of poetry won a National Poetry Series award. And she began her third book of poetry,
This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (U of California P, 2005) when she realized that the US would once again begin bombing Iraq. In this series of poems written from November 30, 2002 to March 30, 2003, she mixes lyric conventions with news reports of the deployment to write a series of prose poems that wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. Her memoir,
the Transformation (Atelos, 2007), tells the story of three people who move between Hawaii and New York in order to talk about cultural geography, ecology, anticolonialism, queer theory, language politics, the academy, and recent wars. She is also the author of
Well Then There Now (Cambridge: Black Sparrow P, 2011),
Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan U, 2001),
Response (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon P, 1996) and
Everybodys Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama, 2001). Her writing has appeared in many anthologies, including
American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry and the
Best American Poetry. And her work has been translated into Norwegian, French, Spanish, Serbian, and many other languages.
She also co-edits with with Jena Osman the book series Chain Links and with nineteen other poets she has been an editor of the collectively edited and collectively funded Subpress. She recently edited with Stephanie Young A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (2011, ChainLinks), the collection Poetry and Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary, with Joan Retallack, (Palgrave, 2006), and American Women Poets in the 21st Century, with Claudia Rankine, (Wesleyan U P, 2002).
In recent years she received the O. B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, an ACLS fellowship, and a Beatrice Bain Research Fellow for Research on Women at UC Berkeley.