A story: There was a cow in the road, struck by a semi–
half-moon of carcass and jutting legs, eyes
already milky with dust and snow, rolled upward
as if tired of this world tilted on its side.
We drove through the pink light of the police cruiser,
her broken flank blowing steam in the air…
— From Difficult Body by Mark Wunderlich
In The Anchorage, his debut collection, poet Mark Wunderlich creates a central metaphor of the body as anchor for the soul.
But in poems located in New York’s summer streets, in the barren snowfields of Wisconsin and along stretches of Cape Cod’s open shoreline, it emerges as a body in peril, one set in motion through the landscape of desire.
At 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25, Wunderlich will read from his work for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.
The talk — presented as part of The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series — is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall. A reception and book signing will immediately follow.
For more information, call (314) 935-7130.
Published in 1999, The Anchorage won 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, is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2014.
Born in 1968 in Winona, Minn., Wunderlich grew up in rural Fountain City, Wis. He earned a master’s degree from Columbia University School of the Arts and a bachelor’s degree in German literature and English from the University of Wisconsin.
Wunderlich’s poems also have been published in The Paris Review, Yale Review, Slate, Tin House, Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review and elsewhere. He numerous honors include the Writers at Work Award, the Jack Kerouac Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Since 2003, Wunderlich has been a member of the literature faculty at Bennington College in Vermont, where he also serves as a member of the core faculty in the Graduate Writing Seminars. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, near the village of Catskill.