Love Poems & God of Nothingness
Presented in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Program in Creative Writing, this edition of Wisconsin Wednesdays features UW Professor, Jesse Lee Kercheval, and UW Alumnus, Mark Wunderlich, for their newest books, Love Poems & God of Nothingness. Join the event at: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/wbf-love-poems-nothingness. Before the event begins, you will see a countdown and the event image.
About Love Poems: Eight years before Sylvia Plath published Ariel, the Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño released Poemas de Amor, a collection of confessional, passionate poetry dedicated to the novelist Juan Carlos Onetti. Both of her own merit and as part of the Uruguayan writers group the Generation of ’45—which included Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Amanda Berenguer, and Ida Vitale—Vilariño is an essential South American poet, and part of a long tradition of Uruguayan women poets. Vilariño and Onetti’s love affair is one of the most famous in South American literature. Poemas de Amor is an intense book, full of poems about sexuality and what it means to be a woman, and stands as a testament to both the necessity and the impossibility of love. This translation brings these highly personal poems to English speaking audiences for the first time side-by-side with the original Spanish language versions.
About God of Nothingness: God of Nothingness is a book for those who have seen death up close or even quietly wished for it. In these poems, honed to a devastating edge, Mark Wunderlich asks: How is it we go on as those around us die? And why go on at all? This collection is a brilliant testament to the human ability to make something tough-minded and resilient out of despair and the inevitability of death drawing near. Some poems are moving elegies addressed to mentors, friends, and family recently gone; some contend with the unasked-for responsibilities of inheritance and the family name; others call forth the understanding of being the end of a genetic line; still others remember a rural midwestern coming-of-age and, chillingly, an encounter with the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Present all the while are the prevailing comforts and wonders found in the natural world, work, and the longing for traditions that seem to be passing from our time. Exquisite in its craft and capaciousness, God of Nothingness is an unflinching journal of solitude and survival.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Jesse Lee Kercheval was born in France and raised in Florida. She is a writer, poet, and visual artist. Her memoir Space, about growing up in Florida during the moon race, won an Alex Award from the American Library Association. In 2020, during the pandemic lock down in Uruguay, she began drawing for the first time in her life, posting one drawing a day on social media where they developed a large following. Her graphic narratives now appear regularly in literary magazines and her graphic memoir, French Girl, will be published in September by Fieldmouse Press.
Mark Wunderlich
Mark Wunderlich was born in Winona, Minnesota and grew up in rural Fountain City, Wisconsin. He attended Concordia College’s Institut für Deutsche Studien, and later the University of Wisconsin from which he received a BA in German Literature and English. Wunderlich earned a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University’s School of the Arts Writing Division where he studied poetry with J.D. McClatchy, William Matthews and Lucie Brock-Broido, among others, and translation with William Weaver and Frank MacShane. Wunderlich’s first book, The Anchorage, was published in 1999 by the University of Massachusetts Press, and received the Lambda Literary Award. His second book, Voluntary Servitude, was published by Graywolf Press in 2004. A third volume of poems titled The Earth Avails, was published in 2014 and received the 2015 Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. He has published individual poems in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Believer, The Paris Review, Slate, Yale Review, The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. His work has been included in over forty anthologies and has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Since 2003 he has been a member of the Literature Faculty at Bennington College in Vermont, and where he become the first director of Poetry at Bennington, which is the college’s endowed series of brief residencies by visiting poets. In 2017 he was appointed the Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program. Wunderlich is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Amy Lowell Trust. He is also the recipient of Writers at Work Award, the Jack Kerouac Prize, and a fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the MacDowell Colony. In 2012 he received an Editor’s Prize from the Missouri Review and was also selected for a residency at the Arteles Creativity Center in Hämeenkyrö, Finland.