The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth
by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
$19.95
“The poems of Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s fourth collection lure, hypnotize, and stun. Wilkinson beckons us to slip out of the mundane acts of day-to-day life and into a world devoid of boundaries and temporal continuity. Memory collides with fantasy to yield a series of prose and lyrical fragments described by Graham Foust as being ‘equal parts flashed-forward backstory and passing sad daydream.’ A pervasive, uncanny awareness of self tumbles through the book as the speaker reveals his knowledge of intimate details. Such is the case in ‘sleeping & arriving alike’ where the speaker declares, ‘I know the name of what you used to wish to become. I know the sounds you make sleeping & arriving alike.’ This collection is rife with similarly unsettling insights, and ultimately, we emerge from Wilkinson’s cinema of curiosa refreshingly disturbed and ready to question our routine acts both as performers and a voyeurs.”– American Poet
Format: paperback
“The poems of Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s fourth collection lure, hypnotize, and stun. Wilkinson beckons us to slip out of the mundane acts of day-to-day life and into a world devoid of boundaries and temporal continuity. Memory collides with fantasy to yield a series of prose and lyrical fragments described by Graham Foust as being ‘equal parts flashed-forward backstory and passing sad daydream.’ A pervasive, uncanny awareness of self tumbles through the book as the speaker reveals his knowledge of intimate details. Such is the case in ‘sleeping & arriving alike’ where the speaker declares, ‘I know the name of what you used to wish to become. I know the sounds you make sleeping & arriving alike.’ This collection is rife with similarly unsettling insights, and ultimately, we emerge from Wilkinson’s cinema of curiosa refreshingly disturbed and ready to question our routine acts both as performers and a voyeurs.” –American Poet, magazine of the Academy of American Poets
“…Wilkinson has honed his craft to the point that he is now cutting, editing, and hand-painting the brief frames of his poems not before the screening, but as the reel is spinning. The transitions are sudden, dramatic, and yet in Wilkinson’s hands they occur with a seamlessness that is eerie, not so much like dreaming as they are like sleepwalking (a theme that recurs throughout his work) — the unsettling and yet strangely enlightening experience of waking up again and again in a strange place without knowledge of how one got there but knowing all too well that the body or the guide has motives and motions of its own.” –Michael McLane, Sugar House Review
“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
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 V“ctor 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 & placed it on the frozen windshield of a truck behind the tannery as the tannery smoked. But it was still early & all the bachelors huddled in a corner to watch who came in. I came in.” And so should you…
Reader’s Companion Available!
Download a free PDF Reader’s Companion for Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth.
Born and raised in Seattle, Joshua Marie Wilkinson is author of Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (Iowa, 2006), and Figures for a Darkroom Voice (with Noah Eli Gordon and Noah Saterstrom: Tarpaulin Sky, 2007). He is also co-editor, with Christina Mengert, of 12X12: Conversations in 21st Century Poetry & Poetics (Iowa, 2009). After stints in Spain, Turkey, Slovakia, Arizona, Ireland, and Colorado, he has settled in Illinois where he teaches at Loyola University Chicago.
Additional information
| Weight | .4 lbs |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 6 × .5 × 9 in |
What you wish to return to will not leave u unmarked
You will build a ship with pigeons & a city of rope. You will listen with your
Pockets emptying. What you forget is up to you. What the pigeons do at
the end of the story is up to them & the lure of the wind. What you lose cannot be
recovered if the light is wrong. What you speak will always have
the capacity to break you. If this is clemency, I’m learning to be aligned with its torque &
needles, with the glug of its voice through water.
___
from Book of the Umbrella
Here the snow begins in your
Postcards.
& black apples arrive
In the arms of a girl
Whose blindness
Came suddenly from
These very apples
___
She folded the paper airplane into an envelope
& sealed it with her fingertips.
____
Will you
Fall
out of my footsteps?
Will you
pour
the last of it
Through me?
This is my dust
The antidotes take
Three nights to sift in
Soppn me
Out
Like a gourd.
____
My dilating heart
Of
Milk and syrup
Liquor and lava.
____
The morgue boys stenciled no maps but
Once found pictures of
A cadaver with balled up
Swallows— one in each
Lung.
A Polaroid of a perfect tuxedo
In the aluminum broom locker.
Even
your scarf learns the little song.
