Whoop and Shush

Winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2013

Whoop & Shush is a book of poems obsessed with the ways we are bound, and bound together, by our language. Whether these poems are re-envisioning a childhood in the Appalachians of East Tennessee, calling out to Cherokee ancestors who no longer populate a lost homeland, or are giving new voice to a range of characters in surprising ways (Shakespeare’s Caliban show’s up at the US Navy’s nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll and a deceased Elvis speaks from the afterlife), the central obsession with how language can strike notes both high and low remains. Whoop & Shush calls out from worlds where words carry a physicality of the intensely observed but do not hesitate to sing their way, through metaphor, toward places where strange wonders counterbalance the starkly real.