Drawing from the paintings of Susan Rothenberg, Gwyneth Scally, and Eric Fischl as well as from the photography of Allison Maletz, Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book-length poem written in small fragments. Comprised of seven sections, the poem is formed as much by the poet’s travels through Turkey, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe as it is by the movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Bill Morrison. The painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here alongside whispers of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book of cinematic images and fragments, of small stories overheard and quickly abandoned, of hidden letters and phone booths, and of ghosts who return with questions. Born and raised in Seattle’s Haller Lake neighborhood, Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of one other book of poetry, Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms, and the chapbook A Ghost as King of the Rabbits. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and an MA in film studies from University College Dublin. Presently he lives in Denver, Colorado, where he is pursuing his doctorate in English and creative writing and completing his first film.

Poetry. SWAMP ISTHMUS takes the stripped, lyric voice of SELENOGRAPHY, the first book of Wilkinson's No Volta pentalogy, and confronts a pre-apocalyptic vision of American urban life. Here, the city and forest are one, as are the river and sewer. The ghost and the body are one, and the buildings and the trees, the sidewalks and the switchbacks all fuse. The poems in SWAMP ISTHMUS create the flipside of the pastoral the urban returns to the rural, their fates inseparable. In this broken, scattered world that still finds a way to be playful and imploring, there is no respite in the trees and streams and no turning back on nostalgia for either nature or the city. Though the second installment of the larger pentalogy, SWAMP ISTHMUS stands alone, archiving and organizing, rehearsing words to hold in the mouth for just that moment. "I can't remember the last time a book of poems gave me such a bewildered, deep pleasure. It's as if Joshua Marie Wilkinson made himself translucent so that these perfect, mysterious arrangements of world and word could shimmer through. I waited on every word, every line break, consistently taken by surprise, totally convinced and awed." Maggie Nelson "Joshua Marie Wilkinson can gently, kindly whirl with no regrets as his language, like a soft machine, enriches us. Freedom and light. And how many experiences It just walks, producing what it wishes, imprinting these magic worlds into us. An inheritance for ever." Toma alamun "SWAMP ISTHMUS puts into the eye everything you've ever imagined wanting but didn't know how to see. Star image, 'a lake of bees' over the eye-mind, what feeling is is what happens here. These poems know our questions before we know them, the things of our questions, and how we long into them some deep yearning and also some re-recognition. I have a strong instinct to lick these pages." Dawn Lundy Martin "Joshua Marie Wilkinson writes a vivid and exuberant poetry. The authentic and surprising associations of SWAMP ISTHMUS construct signposts to lucid and informing mysteries. These poems possess an inviting ease with numerous melodies. SWAMP ISTHMUS is a dazzling collection." Michael Burkard"

Poetry. Joshua Marie Wilkinson's SELENOGRAPHY finds words in want of their own life to chart an adumbrated landscape, "a good song played // too patchily / to keep / in your lungs." Side by side with full-color Polaroids by Califone's Tim Rutili, these poems traverse thought and image, object and vestige, contingency and intention, likening the haunted drift through this sounding of words to a river, "easy incomplete but it / took us / like twigs."

Poetry. THE COURIER'S ARCHIVE & HYMNAL navigates a purgatory made nearly pastoral by a necrotic vision of consumptive rivers, ghost mazes, corpsethieves, and stalkerish moons. With an exacting, halted diction, Joshua Marie Wilkinson swerves us deeper toward the source of this dark archive, stirring our courier to contemplate Basho, Beckett, Kafka, Matta-Clark in hope of materializing a "name for no becoming, stammering through wind." The result is a hypnotizing meditation of mood, mind, perdition, and image. In other words, book three of Wilkinson's No Volta pentology picks up exactly where its predecessors SELENOGRAPHY and SWAMP ISTHMUS leave off. That is to say, beyond the good myths, to a decidedly singular poetic territory "recasting the future freshly black."

Poetry. In prose poems, syntactically elusive sonnets, and haunting, haiku-like fragments, one encounters within FIGURES FOR A DARKROOM VOICE a recurring cast of logically-skewed images, inauspicious yet arresting aphorisms, and characters rendered fully bizarre in the lightest of brushstrokes. Imagine a gallery in which Cornell boxes talk back, a Maya Deren film in which the audience dissolves into projector light, a Philip Glass composition played exclusively on medieval weaponry, such are the compelling results of this collaborative work. The texts of Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, illuminated by the ink drawings of Noah Saterstrom, fuse into a voice as singular as it is sinister.

The follow-up to Swamp Isthmus, and the fourth book in the No Volta pentalogy, Meadow Slasher is a powerful and engaging split from Joshua Marie Wilkinson's earlier work. All of the books in the pentalogy are connected through shared ideas, stories, characters, and settings, but they are also independent and unique in their voice and approach. Meadow Slasher is a meditation on violence and self, and it maps out the intensity of a break down, navigating a shadowy terrain of loss, dread, fear, and exuberance. Drawn from a place of questioning, the end result are poems that are eerie dialogic and unlike anything you've encountered from Wilkinson before.

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.