The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth

Invoking connections between cinematic and poetic images, The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth traverses a split between the essential innocence and peculiar severity of children's games. Drawing on films such as Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive and Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, the art of Yoshitomo Nara, and the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Wilkinson shifts between lyrical fragments and stark, image-laden prose poems in a series of phantom songs and little yarns: "The messenger picked a powdered tulip and placed it on the frozen windshield of a truck behind the tannery as the tannery smoked. But it was still early and all the bachelors huddled in a corner to watch who came in. I came in." And so should you...

"Equal parts flashed-forward backstory and passing sad daydream, The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth helps us and hips us to the circus of public secrets. I trust this book as far as it can throw me." Graham Foust

Reading this collection is like trying on someone else's dreams. Or getting secret, elliptical messages from the books that you read, and loved, in childhood. Strangely satisfying, and satisfyingly strange — I'm a fan." Kelly Link

"Moving away from the book-length structure that dominated his early work, The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth, his third full-length book, attempts to draw Wilkinson's usual repertoire of influences — film, theory, art — into something wholly new." Sean Patrick Hill, Rain Taxi (Read the entire )

In prose poems and lyric fragments, Joshua Marie Wilkinson uses the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and others — and graduate degrees in poetry and film — to entice readers into the extraordinary correlation between poetic and cinematic imagery.

Poetry. In prose poems and lyric fragments, Joshua Marie Wilkinson uses the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and others--and graduate degrees in poetry and film--to entice readers into the extraordinary correlation between poetic and cinematic imagery.

Born and raised in Seattle, Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of five books of poetry, most recently SELENOGRAPHY (Sidebrow Books, 2010). He has also edited two anthologies for University of Iowa Press, including Poets on Teaching, due out fall 2010. A tour documentary about the band Califone, entitled Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape, is also forthcoming. He teaches at Loyola University Chicago, and divides his time between Chicago and Athens, Georgia.