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Sign up todayThe Wild Delight of Wild Things
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Learn moreAlthough grief is at the forefront of these poems, The Wild Delight of Wild Things is a simple love letter to Turner's late wife, poet Ilyse Kusnetz (1966-2016).
The poems are also a love letter to our planet during the ongoing sixth mass extinction. Intertwining this immense grief, Turner explores the hybrid borderlands of genre, and the meditations on love and loss blur the boundaries between poetry and lyric prose. In Italian, the word "stanza" is rooted in the word "room."
And so, stanza by stanza, room by room, page by page, we draft ourselves forward into the imagination, our arms filled with all that we can carry from the days gone by. This is the art of survival. Profound grief teaches us how to dwell in the house of memory—that vibrant temporal landscape of the past—where we might live with the dead we love once more.
Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. His memoir My Life as a Foreign Country was published in 2014. He’s the editor of The Kiss, and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, and other fine journals. Turner was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando with Dene, the world's sweetest golden retriever.
Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. His memoir My Life as a Foreign Country was published in 2014. He’s the editor of The Kiss, and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, and other fine journals. Turner was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando with Dene, the world's sweetest golden retriever.
Reviews
"Brian Turner's The Wild Delight of Wild Things brought me to my knees, kissed the top of my head, and gently gave my heart back to me. What do we mean when we say we loved and lost someone? This profoundly beautiful book begins inside a life-changing relationship and extends with graceful tendrils out into the world, reminding us that by sharing our experiences we make an endless spiral form stretching out to everyone and everything. A tender heart curl. An epic love poem."
—Lidia Yuknavitch